Personal computer design has hit a wall.
By and large, we have rectangular desktop PCs and flip-up laptop PCs. There’s the occasional deviant, such as the adjustable iMac, but even that works about the same as the others.
In these days of sameness, consumers are increasingly waiting on the sidelines unconvinced that they should plunk down a few hundred bucks for a new machine when the old one works fine.
So where is the idea for a new, new thing? Consider a device that was announced at the Microsoft conference in Seattle last month. It works kind of like a Nintendo cartridge or an eight-track tape. It’s about the size of a pack of 3-by-5-inch index cards.
Excited tech evangelists speculate that at last we have a full-fledged Windows PC that actually fits in your pocket.
It’s called a modular computer. It works like a Palm hand-held with a touch screen. Better yet, the device can slip into a laptop or desktop computer’s body, allowing you to take it where you want, and use it how you want.
Plus, its designers promise you can have it by the holidays, for about $1,500.
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Skeptical? Of course.
Conflicted
This whiz-bang thing is maturing at a time when Silicon Valley is feeling horribly conflicted. Like a jilted lover, we want to believe in something, but don’t want to be suckered again.
The latest to make the modular computing pitch is a little outfit called OQO (pronounced oh-Q-oh) of San Francisco. OQO calls its modular computer an “Ultra-Personal PC,” which is cumbersome, to say the least.
The people at OQO are not the only ones to talk up the idea of modular computing: IBM and Xybernaut, a company that makes wearable computers for industrial use, are also big on the idea.
OQO is the first of the firms to promise a delivery date and a palatable price. It is also the first to offer specifications that sound like a true full-featured PC: 1 gigahertz processor, 256 megabytes of memory, 10-gigabyte hard drive, USB and FireWire ports, and wireless networking.
“We’ve designed this to be your sole computer,” said Jory Bell, co-founder and CEO of OQO. “Once you bring the power of a full-featured operating system with you all the time, it replaces a lot of devices including the PDA, MP3 players, BlackBerry devices.”
That’s big talk, and Bell doesn’t want to sound like he’s threatening half of the consumer electronics industry. He toned it down.
“I would be a little concerned with targeting that as what we’re competing with. We see ourselves more as the evolution of the computer.”
But the important thing is not the name, it’s the shift that OQO’s modular computer represents.
In the mid-1990s, one of the PC user’s biggest complaints was that the machines didn’t run software quickly enough. Word processing documents and spreadsheets took too long to open; games played too slowly. But since then, PC-makers have put in faster and faster chips and packed in more and more memory. Now, the computer of two years ago is plenty fast unless you are a great lover of digital music, digital video editing or first-person shooter games.
Today’s bottleneck is at a different place. We want our Internet connections to be faster, and we want to take our work to more locations.
“We’ve got an entire audience that is no longer chasing performance,” said Rob Enderle, vice president of desktop and mobile technology at Giga Information Group.
Portability
That’s where modular computers come in. They don’t promise to make Internet connections any faster, but they might allow people to move their computers around more easily, between work, home and other environments.
“According to our surveys, the corporation has continually indicated it has wanted to buy this if it is done right,” Enderle said.
“I still think it represents one of the possible futures for the personal computer, one of the more compelling ones,” he said.
Bell said that more than any specific idea, there was a certain ethic that OQO inherited from Apple Computer. Bell, along with two other OQO employees, helped design Apple’s Titanium PowerBook.
“We wanted to bring ideas from devices such as iPod, well-designed products that have nice aesthetic sensibility, but are personal,” he said.
In another coincidence, OQO’s computer uses the same Toshiba hard drive as Apple’s iPod music player.