Hasta La Gadget!

Google’s Chromebook line is often maligned as inexpensive but underpowered or, in the case of the Pixel, a really nice screen in front of limited functionality and an exorbitant price tag. But by pairing a solid build with a $280 price tag, HP seems to have finally found the right balance of affordability and performance in the new Chromebook 11.

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It’s almost like Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft have actually launched smartwatches. Except of course they haven’t. But who cares! Analyst house ABI Research has been stroking its collective beard and come up with a forecast for the size of the nascent smartwatch market. And — drum roll please! — it reckons you can bank on more than 1.2 million of the wrist-strapped gizmos shipping this year.

Put another way, that’s about as many Raspberry Pi microcomputers shipped in its first year on sale. Or just over a third as many netbooks are predicted to ship this year (3.97 million units globally, according to IHS iSuppli). Which means smartwatches could be about as popular as a niche gadget for learning about computing/making a DIY robot, but less popular than the PC that’s cannonballing towards extinction the quickest.

Which sounds about as plausible as any guesstimate produced prior to any mainstream tech companies actually launching product. If you’re in the business of reading tea  leaves it helps if you wait for someone to make a brew before doing divinations.

ABI says its “market intelligence” of the “strong potential emergence of smart watches” — note the careful hedge, and don’t bet the farm on this one just yet — is based on the emergence over the past nine months of “a number of new smart watches”, which is likely referring to Kickstarter-funded Pebble and its myriad of wrist-coveting, crowdfunded competitors.

The analyst also says its forecast is based on ”contributing factors” that it reckons are encouraging the smartwatch market to (maybe) emerge from its Kickstarter-powered chrysalis and (possibly) blossom into a standalone butterfly — namely:

…the high penetration of smartphones in many world markets, the wide availability and low cost of MEMS sensors, energy efficient connectivity technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0, and a flourishing app ecosystem.

Even though the smartwatch market remains a partially formed, largely limp-wristed creature, listlessly stuck within its chrysalis of potential, ABI has already spotted four categories hoping to fly in the months and years ahead — aka: notification types (such as MetaWatch and Cookoo); voice operational smartwatches (such as Martian); hybrid smartwatches; and completely independent smartwatches — i.e. smartwatches that have their own OS and aren’t just playing second fiddle to a smartphone.

In the latter category, ABI cites I’m Watch as an example but also suggests that other “possible archetypes” could be “Apple’s hotly anticipated iWatch, Samsung’s Galaxy Altius and Microsoft[‘s ‘Windows Watch’, or whatever catchy name Redmond ends up bestowing on it, if indeed it ends up making such a thing at all]. If Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Justin Bieber decide to launch their own Android-powered smartwatches ABI would presumably add those in here too.

“Smartwatches that replicate the functionality of a mobile handset or smartphone are not yet commercially feasible, though the technologies are certainly being prepared,” adds senior analyst Joshua Flood in a quasi-illuminating statement of the potential factors that could influence this nascent market’s potential as the hands on our (non-smart)watches push inexorably on.

[Image by Telstar Logistics via Flickr]

You know what sucks about buying 4G enabled netbooks and tablets? Suddenly you have another monthly bill to deal with. It adds up, making the gadget cost a lot more in the long run than the initial sticker price. T-Mobile’s 4G Connect effectively kills that. More »

Windows 8 hardware sales are off to a slow start as shoppers scratch their heads over Microsoft’s new operating system and flock to low-cost tablets instead. Could a souped-up netbook save the day? The latest hybrids powered by Intel Atom processors promise the best of both worlds: the versatility of a laptop combined with the portability of a touch screen slate. But now that we’ve tested a couple of these detachables, I’ve concluded that the folks who price these things are detached from reality. More »

We saw a leaked hint of what was coming for Intel’s Valleyview system-on-a-chip (SoC), but now the full plan appears to have been outed by Chinese blog Expreview. The lineup will feature four models of the 22nm chips, with the D- and M-series looking to replace the Cedar Trail 32nm SoC chips used in current netbook and low-end desktop devices. The I-series is for embedded and industrial use, while the T-series would appear in tablets and other small form-factor devices, according to the leaked slides. That model would supersede the Clover Trail SoCs, which are only just arriving themselves in upcoming Windows 8 slates like the Acer W510 or Asus Tablet 810.

The chips should offer a burly horsepower bump over their predecessors, with up to four cores and clock speeds topping out at 2.4Ghz. The icing on the cake will be the integrated Gen 7 graphics engines of Ivy Bridge fame, featuring the same HD 4000 and HD 2500 GPU‘s as the grownup chips, but with only four “execution units” instead of the 16 you’d find there. That would offload functions like video decoding and 3D rendering from the CPU and allow simultaneous display to a TV or monitor. Bay Trail would also support 8GB of DDR3 RAM, double that of the “last” gen, as well as USB 3.0, SATA 2.0 and a host of other connection options. If the leak is accurate, the processors would arrive sometime next year, we’ll just have to wait and see if that’s soon enough for Intel to take a run at its formidable competition.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Tablets

Intel’s full Atom ‘Bay Trail’ roadmap leaked: 22nm, Ivy Bridge graphics, quad-core originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 08:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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