An intractable dilemma inside barebone laptops

MUMBAI: Fourteen-year-old Anirban Basu has a new problem at hand. The computer he carries in his school bag hangs up when he tries to download some educative material from a website.

A local computer expert has suggested installation of another operating system and increasing the hard disk space — remedies he can ill afford at this stage.

Anirban’s case is not an isolated one. A major roadblock before mass adoption of low-price PCs is the poor performance of entry level products, which are being sold with a stress on features such as portability and low price.

The stress on portability may have reduced the weight of the notebook PCs, but it has reduced the size of the screen, too.

Indeed, some of the latest notebooks weigh less than a kilogram and come with screens in the 4-7 inches range. Thus, be it the much-publicised XO laptop of the One Laptop Per Child project (which the government rejected recently) or a few of the recently launched notebooks, screen size is a major point of criticism.

PC makers do not read much into the success of portable PCs.

“Why are students being exposed to small screens when they are used to big blackboards?” asks Devita Saraf, managing director of Vu Technologies and director-marketing, Zenith Computers. “Also, if the laptop is targeted for academic purposes, it should not be sold as a tool for entertainment,” she added.

Criticism apart, the demand for laptops has been on the rise. As per the hardware industry trade body Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT), the sale of notebooks has exceeded the demand for desktop PCs since 2005.

In his note in the annual Industry Performance Report released by MAIT, director Vinnie Mehta said, “Notebooks have emerged as a significant driver for the PC market in India in the first half of 2007-08.

Sales of notebooks surpassed 6.8 lakh units, growing 59% over the same period last year.” Notebooks now account for 21% of the total PC market in the country as compared with less than 3% just four years ago.

Albert Tung, managing director, Asus India, which has recently forayed into manufacturing laptops, said India would require 5 lakh low-price laptops in 2008, out of an estimated 10 million units required worldwide.

The requirement was always there, but the “technology has matured only now and the cost barriers have gone down,” Tung added. For instance, the cost of the mother board, the primary circuit board that allows all the parts of a computer to receive power and communicate, has fallen 10% year-on-year.

However, Prabodh Vyas, managing director of Gigabyte Technologies India, said today’s motherboards are laden with new features in addition to new chipsets, resulting in better performance.

According to him, the prices of motherboards has remained stable over the last few years, while the price of LCD panels has come down. The capacity of the central processing units has also increased, consuming lesser power and increasing the battery life. An entry level notebook can now provide battery support for up to 3 hours.

People mobility is another driver. At the entry level, notebook sellers target school and college students in addition to first-time buyers.

But, the requirements of each of these segments are distinctly different. A first-time user would look to buy a laptop that is simple to use and meets basic computing requirements like word processing and calculations through excel sheets etc.

On the other hand, a school or college student would like to reach out to his peers through the vehicle of Internet, in addition to using the word processor.

Catering to demand such as the above is taken care of by an appropriate configuration of a PC. As of now, the available ‘low price’ laptops come with similar configuration.

On an average, they would provide 2-4 GB of hard disk space that can be increased to up to 60 GB, meaning the cost would rise in case one wishes to upgrade a 4 GB capacity laptop to make it at least 30 GB.

Today, this would entail an additional cost of Rs3,500. The general RAM capacity available is 512 MB, which is upgradable to 1 GB depending upon a user’s requirement.

Most importantly, the notebooks available come bundled with some version of Linux operating system that supports few applications.

“A 4 GB hard disk capacity PC is good only for word processing, Excel sheet-specific work, and e-mail exchanges to some extent. You may just forget about games and watching movies,” rues an expert tester of PCs in Mumbai.

This is why notebook makers like ASUS Tek, HCL Infosystems and others are planning to launch Windows bundled notebooks soon.

However, the subtext in this is that bundling a proprietary operating system like Windows will lead to an increase in cost again. An entry level home laptop could well cross the Rs20,000 mark, a level some entry level business laptops are already available at, with much better configuration and performance. In the end, the buyer gets what he chooses.

t_amit@dnaindia.net