The Expanding Frontiers of Mobility

posted by Kevin Haley on July 30, 2008

Expanding the Frontiers of Mobility – we came up with this theme for the Mobility Pavilion at IDF to describe our vision. The mobile PC market and industry are expanding – morphing from building the PC’s we know and love to building many things, from kind-of-like-PC’s to real PC’s to hyper-PC’s. So besides all this cool new stuff, what does an expanding frontier mean and why does it matter to you?

For me frontier evokes a place of opportunity where things are new and fresh, a place where innovation thrives. My picture of this comes from field of ecology where they use the term ecotone to describe what I mean. The Ecotone Journal says it like this: “In the natural world an ecotone is a landscape where two separate ecosystems overlap, a place of danger and opportunity…” One of our ecosystems is all the mobile devices available today. The other ecosystem is the rest of the world with it’s potential new applications and new customers. The border between the two is our mobile frontier.

We are pushing the expansion of the mobile frontier with technologies that have new applications and categories in mind. As these categories multiply there is more frontier, each new category brings it’s own miles of border. In the recent past the laptop market was mostly homogenous with the common goals of lighter systems, more features and longer battery life. With expanding frontiers we will see categories that place value on other aspects like simplicity, or size, or all-out performance, or fashionable looks or something we haven’t thought of yet.

So back to why we thought of the Expanding the Frontiers of Mobility theme in the first place. We can use this to describe the Mobility Pavilion, an area where we will show mobile systems that are expanding the frontier right now, systems that aren’t all on the store shelves yet. We will have a line-up of netbooks, mobile internet devices, consumer laptops, business laptops, gaming laptops and will introduce a mobile concept system that may or may not be a laptop – I can’t quite figure it out yet. Technology exhibits will cover wireless connectivity, batteries, thermal management, graphics and systems that use mobile components “differently.” Together these represent an expanding mobility frontier, a place of opportunity, and maybe even a place of danger – and reward for the designers who get it right.

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tagged: idf2008, intel, Intel Developer Forum, laptop, mobile computing