Compact Computing

If you thought Netbooks were revolutionary and a breath of fresh air to

traditional laptops, and mobile phones have been a remarkable story, then the

kinds of mobile devices you can expect to see this year will blow your socks

off. New kinds of tablets, slates, e-book readers, multi-touch smartphones, 3D

laptops are going to take the mobile world by storm, and reduce the importance

of desktops even further. Every major player is gearing up to introduce

something in the mobile computing space. So what's causing this sudden swarm of

mobile devices to appear? Which are the technologies behind them? We'll break

these up into several, easy to understand parts.

Multi-Touch



First up is Multi-touch, the technology that was used by Apple in when it

launched the iPhone, the device that took the entire mobile phone industry by

surprise. Multi-touch doesn't need an introduction. Before it emerged, we could

only touch or tap a touch screen once at any point of time to use it.

Multi-touch on the other hand, allows the screen to be operated by touching

multiple points simultaneously. The upcoming Windows mobile 7 OS is a complete

shift from the previous versions, which had failed to impress the mobile world.

The new OS however, will provide multi-touch capabilities in smartphones, and

offer dozens of exciting features and capabilities to help people stay connected

with each other using all communication channels that are popular these

days-email, voice, SMS, social networking, etc. At the time of writing this

piece, Microsoft had demoed the Windows Phone 7 series emulator.

Smartphone processors



The second major development in mobile computing devices is in mobile

processors. The processors that dominate the smartphone market are mostly based

on the ARM reference designs and instruction sets. Some of these include

Qualcomm's SnapDragon, Nvidia's Tegra, TI OMAP, and Samsung. Intel too is trying

to enter the smartphones market. While it would be impossible to cover all these

processors in this article, we'll talk about developments in some of them,

starting with nVidia's Tegra.

Microsoft's Windows 7 Emulator

Microsoft has already announced major plans around the next release of its mobile platform-Windows mobile 7. Initially, Microsoft only demoed Windows 7 as an emulator at various forums, be it the mobile World Congress, or MIX 2010 conference. It appears to be a complete deviation from previous Windows platforms, which failed to stand anywhere amongst rivals like Android, iPhone, etc. In fact, somebody managed to hack into the Windows Mobile 7 emulator and spill the beans about its potential by posting a video of what to expect from it. The videos show how MS is planning to bring its popular applications like MS Office, OneNote, etc to Windows mobile 7, all using multi-touch and a virtual keyboard. Moreover, development for the Windows mobile 7 platform will not be done using Silverlight 4 and XNA Game Studio.

Nvidia's Tegra processor is also being dubbed as a mobile web processor. Why

web processor? Simple-most of the action today is happening on the web. The web

has literally become the place for doing everything. So whether it's enterprise

applications, productivity apps, fun and games, videos, or anything else, people

look to the web for doing anything these days. The web processor is supposed to

make the web experience much better, and it does that by providing support for

1080p high-definition video encoding/decoding, support for HD web streaming

formats like YouTube, good quality audio, excellent graphics quality, and much

more, all on a single system-on-a-chip. Due to this, the size of Tegra is small

enough to fit inside a smartphone, and even more impressive is the fact that it

consumes less than 1 Watt of power. Due to this, it's expected to offer 140

hours of audio and 16 hours of HD video playback. Initially, you'll only see

Tegra-based tablets hit the market. What's more, these tablets are 2G/3G ready,

so you could simply insert a SIM card into the tablet, and you have a mobile

Internet device cum smartphone in your hands. So essentially, these Tegra based

tablets are tapping a category, which for a long time has never quite

succeeded-the sub-notebooks market.

Intel is also trying to enter the smartphone space and there are rumors that

the Silicon giant is tying up with Nokia to bring out a new processor for

smartphones, code-named Penwell. This would follow Intel's x86 instruction set,

the benefit of which would be better compatibility with desktops, laptops, etc.

All this obviously translates into smartphones with higher compute capabilities,

longer battery life, and many more features.

Notebook action



If you think all the action is only happening in the smartphones and tablet

space, then think again. Notebooks are not going to loose their charm in any

way. Let's start from the notebook processors. Intel is offering its Core 2

Extreme mobile processors, which are available in dual and quad-core designs.

Likewise, AMD has also upped its Turion range with the X2 ultra dual core and

the X2 dual core. So imagine carrying a laptop around with two or four CPU cores

inside. You'll need that much power because the applications running on them are

becoming more powerful. You think your machine won't get taxed by browsing the

web? Think again, because the web is no longer a conglomeration of static web

pages. It's a live, happening place full of audio, video, and graphically rich

applications that run online. So whether it's doing a multi-way audio/video

conference using an online collaboration suite, or it's playing back HD videos

from YouTube, you'll need the processing power to run them. And if there's a

rogue or buggy JavaScript on a website, then it could bring your machine to a

crawl. If the web could consume so much power, then imagine the compute power

that would be consumed by the regular desktop applications. Virtualization for

instance, is a technology that isn't just required at the server end. It's also

being used on desktops and laptops, and it requires a lot of hardware resources.

Besides processors, we also saw laptops with 3D capabilities introduced

recently. Take Acer's 3D laptop that was launched recently. The laptop allows

you to watch 3D movies, play 3D games, and much more, by wearing special

glasses.

Finally, mobile device manufacturers have begun to think beyond using

keyboards, and other physical pointing devices to natural user interfaces. This

month, we've heard enough news about all kinds of mobile devices to take the

world by storm. Lastly, all the action in mobile computing is not only happening

due to developments in hardware. Rather, it's the software that's fueling this

growth. Consider this. Microsoft is launching an emulator for its upcoming

Windows 7 mobile platform, so that developers can start developing software for

it. The Redmond giant will allow developers to host their apps for the new

platform on its own online apps store. So, by the time devices are available in

the market, there will be ample software available to utilize the same.

Similarly, the key success factor for most mobile devices today are the

applications available for them.

Next-GPUs

Gaining on Power