Netbook Evangelist | The blog with information resources for netbooks

Following rival Apple’s lead, Dell is working on a new handheld mobile internet device that will be slightly larger than an iPod Touch and lack cellular connectivity.

Dell plans to sell the device from later this year – if it doesn’t can the ‘risky’ project first reports ComputerWorld.com.

Prototypes of the device are running Goolgle’s Linux-based Android operating system, although Dell has refused to comment on the device, saying that it didn’t comment on rumours and speculation.

Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) combine the attributes of netbooks and smartphones in a pocket-sized package, although they have yet to gain much market traction owing to complaints about short battery life and small screens.

Dell’s device would be its first MID – if the rumours are true, but because Dell relies on volume sales the proposed foray into a cutting edge category such as MIDs would be quite outside standard operating procedure.

MIDs are more similar to smartphones than netbooks, implying the need for Dell to find partnerships with wireless carriers who can provide services like WiMax.

Dell has been rumoured to be looking at smartphones before, such as at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year when there was much talk of an Android-based smartphones – which turned out to be vapourware.

The last pocket-sized device Dell had which anyone knew about was the Axim PDA, which quietly died two years ago owing to poor sales.

Kohjinsha is about to launch a significant overhaul of its convertible tablet netbook that will bring it to the forefront in terms of features, a leak shows. The SK3 will have 802.11n Wi-Fi and, to draw on the better wireless, both outward- and inward-facing cameras for video chats or photography. It’s also one of the first tablet netbooks to support Windows 7; what this involves isn’t known by UMPC Portal, but it may involve either tighter integration with the touch elements of the Microsoft OS or else a more finger-ready screen.

The resulting system would still be one of the smaller PCs of its type with a 7-inch swiveling LCD, a 1.33GHz Atom processor and 1GB of RAM. Its predecessor the SC3 has a 60GB hard drive, but it’s uncertain if this will be upgraded with a larger rotating disk or replaced entirely in favor of an SSD. A formal announcement is expected sometime this week and will officially limit sales to Japan, although importers like Dynamism may bring the SK3 to the US.

It had to happen. Only the timing seems a bit off because of the recession. But there’s gonna be a Disney netbook, a “Netpal” for 6-12 year-olds, made by netbook pioneer Asustek and selling for $350 at Toys “R” Us starting in late July. A version with more storage and a longer battery will go through Amazon.com and other retailers. The widget should go international by the end of the year. It’s based on Atom and XP with an 8.9-inch screen, 16GB or 160GB of storage, Wi-Fi, integrated web cam, heavy parental controls and a cutesy user interface.

French portable media players maker Archos introduced last night the Archos 9, a Windows 7 powered touchscreen-only Internet tablet. Calling it a MiniPC, the Archos 9 is not exactly the Google Android-touting Archos MID everybody was expecting.

The skinny Archos 9 (0.63 inch thick) weighs just under 1.8 pounds and features a 8.9-inch resistive touchscreen display (1024 by 600 pixels resolution). The company also managed to pack inside a 80GB hard drive and to antennas for DVB-T broadcasts (for viewing a channel and recording another one at the same time).

Archos 9 is powered by an Intel Atom Z515 processors clocked at 1.2 GHz and runs with 1GB of DDR2 RAM. In terms of connectivity, the tablet can satisfy most modern needs with Wi-FI (802.11 b/g), Bluetooth 2.1, a 10/100 Ethernet port and two USB 2.0 ports.

Keeping consistent with its PMP siblings, the Archos 9 has an audio and video output (VGA), two stereo speakers and can easily place Skype calls with its integrated 1.3-megapixel camera and microphone. An optical trackpad and an on-screen keyboard can be used for navigation and data input.

The surprise with the new Archos 9 is the operating system. For a few months now, the French company was expected to launch a Google Android-based mobile Internet device (see “11 Cool Android Prototypes We’d Like to See”), but Windows 7 has now replaced it in this line-up.

Of course, having Windows 7 on board means that the Archos 9 will only be available in late October, when Microsoft will introduce the final version of the OS on the market. The target pricing for the Archos 9 is around $635, and exact availability dates are yet to be announced.

Netbook vendors are considering keeping their Intel Atom N270 and N280-based netbooks using Windows XP and will not offer upgrades to Windows 7 due to increasing costs and low consumer demand, according to industry sources.

The current price of Windows XP OEM version is only around US$25-30, but the latest quotes from Microsoft for the netbook version of Windows 7 is around US$45-55 and therefore first-tier vendors are unable to transfer the cost to the netbooks’ sales price due to the fierce competition.

The first-tier notebook vendors are still negotiating with Microsoft hoping to bring the price down.

Since most consumers think Windows XP is enough to handle their needs in a netbook, the Upgrade to Windows 7 Program will provide less incentive to attract consumers to purchase netbooks.

Currently, most netbook vendors are focusing on only adopting Windows 7 in their next generation Atom N450-based netbooks, while some vendors are considering offer upgrades for their N280-based products.

In additional news, Intel plans to announce the single-core Atom D410 and dual-core Atom D510 for nettops in October 2009 replacing the current Atom 230 and 330. Atom 230 and 330 will be phased out in the first quarter of 2010.

Netbooks now comprise 8 percent of the laptop market, but are we satisfied? Intel says no: its “Pine Trail” roadmap (that’s the code name for its next-gen Atom processors) reveals plans for an integrated CPU/GPU, with claims of saving space as well as battery life. While the graphics power likely won’t be as impressive as an Nvidia ION processor, it will change the landscape of a pretty fast-growing field. Here’s what we’d like to see in the near-future of Netbooks. Sound off and tell us what you’re looking for–that is, if you’re looking for a Netbook at all.

1. Better video. While Atom processors can handle YouTube and some HD video streaming (kinda sorta), there are no DVD drives on these little guys. Video-playing (especially streaming) needs to be silky-smooth, even in HD. Until then, Netbooks will never be truly great portable media devices, which they ought to be. After all, Web browsing is most of what we do with computers.

2. Smaller, please! But with larger keyboards. The whole 11.6-inch and higher trend is disturbing because it’s making semi-bulky Netbooks even larger. While it’s nice for some applications and those who want an affordable 12-inch laptop, this whole XL Netbook trend takes away from the whole gee-whiz “look how small my notebook is!” appeal that made Netbooks an overnight hit in the first place. What we’re really saying is: make better use of the size. Edge-to-edge keyboards and edge-to-edge screens should become the norm, and with better engineering, we’d like to see 10-inch Netbooks become even thinner and more compact. A Netbook could feel like a small paperback book, not a portable VCR.

3. Adopt modern operating systems. XP and Linux make Netbooks seem a bit lost in time, and honestly, a 10-incher at 1,024×600 gets crowded for programs made for larger screens. How about an optimized upgrade? Consider the iPhone OS: its great success was designing an interface specifically created for the size and ergonomics of the device’s screen. In fact, hey: a modified iPhone OS wouldn’t be a bad idea at all for a Netbook. While Windows 7 is aimed at going multiplatform, we also hope it considers optimizing the experience for smaller screens.

4. Get even cheaper. A large part of the Netbook appeal, to this point, has been price. At a cost of $43 for an Atom processor versus $133 for a Core 2 Duo, machines can be cheaper. But we want cheaper still. The challenge: come under 100 bucks. Already, Dell’s got a $299 Netbook, and HP’s got a subsidized Mini through Verizon. As “Pine Trail” makes its way through the Netbook landscape, it would be really, really great if those old Atom N270 processors could be discounted into ultra-cheapie models.

5. Explore the tablet. Is that so wrong? Opening a minikeyboard and screen can solve some mobile writing issues, but a regular smartphone can do many of the tasks we associate with “mobile computing.” Make the screen larger (for instance, a tablet), and have an optional keyboard (software and/or otherwise), and perhaps we’ll have a more media-friendly mobile PC than the bulkier, thicker Netbook population. Is this Apple’s plan? Perhaps. But it should, possibly, be everyone’s. We’re already starting to see some touch screens hit the Netbook space: Dell’s education-targeted Latitude 2100 offers it as an option, and the Asus has a swiveling touch-screen Netbook on the horizon. It’s only the beginning.

6. Be more like phones. Phones are our future Netbooks, and it’s becoming clearer every day. Android, BlackBerry, and the iPhone OS are developing new ways to get tasks done in palm-size miniapps. Interfaces are being revolutionized. Meanwhile, Netbooks are using the same flip-top keyboard-and-screen concept that’s been circling around since the days of the original PowerBook. The more future-oriented design, the better (like the dual-screened Asus prototype shown above, provided it doesn’t suck down batteries like Dr. Pibbs).

Windows 7 is free for now, and works extremely well on netbooks. That said, installing the OS on these tiny laptops—especially low-end models—can be daunting. Here’s how to do it, the easy way:

If the Release Candidate is any indication (and it should be), then Windows 7 will be a nice upgrade for any Windows user. The new OS, however, is a huge step up for netbook users. Vista is notoriously poorly suited to netbooks; a buggy resource hog that subjects its users to incessant dialog boxes and requires far too many clicks to perform basic tasks, it’s kind of a nightmare to use on a 9-inch laptop with a 1.5-inch trackpad.

Windows XP has been given a boost by netbooks, as its system requirements—more-or-less decided in 2001—are more in line with the specs hardware like the Eee PC and Mini 9. But let’s face it: XP is nearly a decade old. Its user experience is trumped by free alternatives like Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Linpus, and it’s not at all optimized for solid-state drives—especially cheap ones. This means that on low-end, SSD-based netbooks, it borders on unusable.

Hence, Windows 7. It’s noticeably faster than Vista on low-spec machines, properly optimized for netbook hardware, and, most importantly, free (for now). Thing is, installation isn’t quite as easy as it is on a regular PC—in fact, it can be a pain in the ass: netbooks don’t have DVD drives, which means you’ve either got to get your hands on an external drive or boot from a USB stick for a clean install. Furthermore, smaller SSDs, like the 8GB units in popular versions of the Dell Mini 9 and Acer Aspire One, make a default installation impossible, or at least impractically tight. Luckily, there are simple methods to deal with both of these problems. Let’s get started.

What You’ll Need

• A netbook (Minimum 1GB of RAM, 8GB storage space)

• A 4GB or larger USB drive

• A Windows 7 RC Image (details below)

• A Windows XP/Vista PC or a Mac to prepare the flash drive

• For low-end netbooks, lots (and lots) of time

Getting Windows 7

Downloading Windows 7 is a piece of cake. Just navigate to this page and download the 32-bit version. You’ll need to get a free Windows Live ID if you don’t already have one, but this takes about two minutes.

Microsoft will then give you your very own Windows 7 License key, valid until June 1st of next year. (Although after March 1st, it’ll drive you to the edge of sanity by shutting off every two hours. But that’s a different story, and March is a long way off). Microsoft will then offer up your ISO through a nifty little download manager applet, complete with a “resume” function. There are ways to sidestep this, but don’t: you’d be surprised how hard it is to keep a single HTTP connection alive for long enough to download a 2.36GB file.

Preparing Your Flash Drive

This is the annoying part, but it’s not necessarily that difficult. Here are some guides, by OS (some linked for length):
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista
• Mac OS X (courtesy of Ubuntu, funnily enough):

1. Open a Terminal (under Utilities)

2. Run diskutil list and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g. /dev/disk2)

3. Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN (replace N with the disk number from the last command; in the previous example, N would be 2)

4. Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.iso of=/dev/diskN bs=1m (replace /path/to/downloaded.iso with the path where the image file is located; for example, ./windows7.iso)

5. Run diskutil eject /dev/diskN and remove your flash media when the command completes (this can take a few hours on slower drives)

As some commenters have pointed out, you can also make a flash drive bootable with utilities like LiveUSB Helper. Once you’ve done this, you can mount your Windows 7 ISO with a utility like DaemonTools Lite (For Windows) or MountMe (for Mac), and just copy over all the files to your newly-bootable drive.

Starting Your Install

Ok! Now you’ve got a bootable flash drive, and you’re ready to start installing. It should go without saying, but once you start this process, you’ll lose all existing data on your netbook, so you should back up any important files before going through with anything from here forward.

Insert your USB drive and reboot your netbook. As soon as your BIOS screen flashes, you should see instructions for a) changing your netbook’s boot order or b) entering its BIOS setup. In the first situation, simply assign the USB drive as the first boot device. In the second, navigate through your BIOS settings until you find a “Default Boot Order” page, and do the same thing there.

From there, you should see the first Windows 7 installation screens. Anyone with a 16GB or larger storage device in their netbook can just follow the instructions until the installation completes, and skip the next step.

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If your SSD is smaller than 16GB, or if you just want to save some space, do what they say, but only until the first reboot. After the Windows 7 installer has restarted your computer, you’ll need to modify the boot order again. Do not allow installation to continue! Manually change the boot order to prioritize the USB drive again, just as you did at the beginning of the installation.

Compression!

Once the Windows 7 installer has copied most of its system files to your drive, you’re going to tighten them up with Windows’ trusty old “Compact” command. Here’s what you do, as described by Electronic Pulp:

Choose “Repair” at the Windows 7 Setup screen, go to “Command Prompt” and enter the following code:

d: (or whatever drive letter is assigned to your SSD)
cd \windows\system32
compact.exe d:\*.* /c /s /i

And wait. And wait and wait and wait. This can take anywhere from eight hours to two days, so you’ll want to set your netbook down in a corner and forget about it for a while. [Note: compressing so many of your system files does have a performance cost, but in day-to-day use, it's negligible]

Once this is done, reboot the netbook again and let it continue the installation as normal. That’s it!

All said and done, an 8GB SSD should have nearly 2GB of free space left—not much, but enough to work with. And given that most netbooks come with inbuilt, flush SD expansion slots, and that high-capacity SD cards are extremely affordable, having a small amount of space on your root drive isn’t at all prohibitive.

There are other ways to slim down a Windows 7 install—namely by using programs like vLite, which can strip out some of Windows’ fat directly from the ISO—but Windows’ built-in file compression is the easiest way to squeeze Windows 7 onto your skimpy 8GB SSD.

Setup and Customization Help
Windows 7 runs fairly well out of the box, but as with any new Windows installation, you’re going to need to download some drivers to get things working properly. Vista drivers usually do the trick, but sometimes workarounds are necessary.

Verizon on Thursday said the HP Mini 1151NR would be available through its stores. The $200 price tag includes a $50 mail-in rebate. The service plan starts at $40 a month.

Verizon is not the first to subsidize the price of a netbook in return for a long-term data plan. AT&T recently launched a trial offer of mini-laptops starting at $50. The promotion is only available in the Atlanta and Philadelphia areas and requires customers to sign up forAT&T (NYSE: T)’s at-home DSL and 3G wireless service for two years. The package starts at $60 a month.

In choosing to offer netbooks, AT&T and Verizon are tapping into the hottest-selling segment of the PC market. While analysts expect a decline in sales of standard-size laptops and desktops this year because of the economic recession, sales of netbooks are expected to increase 80% over last year to account for about 8% of the PC market, according to Gartner.

The HP Mini 1151NR has a 10-inch display and is powered by a 1.6-GHz N270 Atom processor from Intel (NSDQ: INTC). The product comes with 1 GB of memory, an 80-GB hard drive, and a keyboard that’s 92% of standard size. The system weighs almost 2.5 pounds, is an inch thick, and comes with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Windows XP Home Edition.

Once the bright spot for hardware sales in the current recession, unit shipments of Intel Atom processors, which power popular netbooks, dropped 33 percent in the first quarter compared to the fourth quarter. Overall, processor unit shipments declined nearly 11 percent sequentially. Intel lost market share to AMD.

Netbooks may have propped up PC sales during the worst of the recession, but the Intel Atom processors behind popular mini notebooks saw their shipments decline by 33 percent in Q1 compared to Q4, proving they are not recession-proof.

The drop in netbook shipments indicates that mini-notebook OEMs held significant inventory of Intel Atom processors coming into 2009, according to market analyst firm IDC, which released the number as part of its report on worldwide processor market share for the first quarter.

Overall, worldwide PC processor unit shipments in Q1 fell 10.9 percent sequentially. From 2008 Q3 to Q4 worldwide PC processor unit shipments fell 17 percent. Year-over-year unit shipments in Q1 2009 were 13 percent lower than Q1 2008.

IDC says that while the decline was slightly more than typically occurs between Q4 and Q1, it indicates that the market’s decline is slowing.

“The PC processor market continued to reflect significant decline in end demand for most of 1Q09,” says Shane Rau, director of IDC’s Semiconductors: Personal Computing research, in a prepared statement announcing the results. “However, some inventory replenishment by OEMs at the end of the quarter helped to slow the decline and bring the quarter in at a level only slightly worse than typical seasonal decline.”

But that doesn’t mean the declines are over, says Rau. IDC says the PC processor market is still in weak condition, and the firm still expects modest sequential unit shipment declines in 2009.

While OEM demand picked up at the end of the quarter and going into April, IDC remains wary that the demand was due to OEMs replenishing inventories rather than a return of end demand.

Q1 processor revenues also down
In Q1 market revenue also declined, 11 percent from Q4 2008 to Q1 2009, and 18 percent from Q3 2008 to Q4 2008. Year-over-year revenue also declined by 25 .1 percent, according to IDC.

Intel Atom processors for netbooks represented 21 percent of Intel’s mobile PC processor shipments in Q1 and 6.5 percent of Intel’s mobile PC processor revenues for the quarter, according to IDC.

Intel lost 4.7 percent of its market share in Q1, owning 77.3 percent unit market share. AMD’s unit market share was 22.3 percent, a gain of 4.6 percent, and VIA Technologies’ market share sat at 0.4 percent.

By form factor in Q1, Intel earned 84.3 percent share in the mobile PC processor segment, a loss of 4.7 percent, AMD finished with 15.0 percent, a gain of 4.7 percent, and VIA earned 0.7 percent, according to IDC.

In the PC server/workstation processor segment, Intel finished with 89.3 percent market share, a gain of 1.2 percent and AMD earned 10.7 percent, a loss of 1.2 percent. In the desktop PC processor segment, Intel earned 70.0 percent, a loss of 3.9 percent, and AMD earned 29.8 percent, a gain of 3.8 percent.

While no word had been shared about the potential of an Android netbook from Dell, a hastily released press release from a company called Bsquare has gone ahead and confirmed it (presumably, without Dell’s permission).

The press release (which is posted after the break) states “Bsquare Corporation (BSQR – News), the leading software solutions provider to the global embedded device community, today announced it is porting Adobe’s Flash Lite 3.17 technology onto Dell Netbooks running Google’s Android platform.”

Bsquare had attempted to remove the information hoping that no one would be the wiser, but the quick eyes of the Internet don’t miss a thing – including rogue press releases.

While the existence of an Android based netbook has been confirmed, no additional details have been released.