Undermining Wintel
As expected, Morris was keen to highlight the advantages ARM and its ecosystem can bring to the sub-notebook market; chiefly smaller, lower power processors allowing cheaper devices with longer battery life.
We countered that, with Intel's imminent Pine Trail platform also promising improvements in these areas, ARM will have to demonstrate pretty substantial improvements in both battery life and price if it's going to convince people to move away from the combination of Intel processor and Windows operating system - Wintel for short - that we're all so familiar with.
What was more surprising was how ready Morris seemed to concede these points. It seems that ARM is not about to get too carried away and make excessively bold claims, which could embarrass it if they fail to materialise.
ARM seems content to play the long game when it comes to the sub-notebook space, and a key part of that is to try to undermine the umbilical link between two-handed computing devices and the Wintel paradigm in the minds of most end-users.
One way of doing that is to support the operating system that hopes to be considered synonymous with the mobile Internet - Google's Android. There have already been a number of Android smartphones launched and ARM will be hoping a growing consumer familiarisation with Android on phones will make them more receptive to it, or Google's Chrome OS, on netbooks.
When ASUS first launched the netbook using a Linux OS, the return rates were very high from consumers expecting the same experience as they get on a regular PC and being disappointed. Unless ARM and its ecosystem can educate the market to accept a computing experience quite different to what it's used to, it might suffer a similar fate to those first netbooks.
