OLPC product road map

One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help every child in the world have access to a modern education, has put forward its product road map. The goal is to deliver robust laptop performance and innovative design for use in the most remote, poor communities at the lowest power and cost in the industry.

“The first version of OLPC’s child-centric laptop, the XO, is a revolution in low-cost, low-power computing. The XO has been distributed to more than 1.4 million children in 35 countries and in 25 languages,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of OLPC. “To fulfill our mission of reaching 500 million children in all remote corners of the planet, OLPC will continue to innovate in design and performance. Because we are a non-profit, we hope that industry will copy us.”

OLPC will be releasing new versions of the XO laptop under the following timetable:

l XO 1.5: The XO 1.5 is the same industrial design as the XO 1.0. Based on a VIA processor, it will provide 2x the speed, 4x DRAM memory and 4x FLASH memory. It will run both the Linux and Windows operating systems. XO 1.5 is available this month at about $200 per unit.

l XO 1.75: The XO 1.75, to be available in early 2011, will be essentially the same industrial design as the XO 1.5, but rubber-bumpered on the outside. Inside will be an 8.9” touch-sensitive display. The XO 1.75 will be based on an ARM processor from Marvell that will enable 2x the speed at 1/4 the power and is targeted at $150 or less. This ARM-based system will complement the XO 1.5, which will remain in production, giving a choice of processor platforms.

l XO 3.0: The XO 3.0 will be available in 2012 at a target price well below $100. It will feature a new design using a single sheet of flexible plastic and will be unbreakable. The XO 3.0 will leapfrog the XO 2.0 announced in 2008 which was a two-page approach that will not be continued. The inner workings of 3.0 will come from the XO 1.75. Follow the OLPC mission through www.laptop.org.

PC market grows again

Buoyed by strong back-to-school demand, worldwide PC shipments returned to positive growth in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09) with an increase of 2.3 percent after three consecutive quarters of decline. Consumer portables remained the key driver, with shipments increasing 33.5 percent from a year ago, while consumer desktop demand remained weak as the market continued its transition to mobility. The decline of commercial PCs also started to slow in 3Q09, providing a hint that IT spending will gradually pick up in upcoming quarters. Mini Notebooks or Netbooks continued to see strong growth with a 37 percent gain over the previous quarter, while the Mini Notebook share of consumer portables increased to 28 percent from 14 percent a year ago. According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, the strong showing in 3Q09 and growth in key segments will lead to net growth of 1.3 percent for 2009 and set the stage for further gains throughout 2013.

Looking forward, the market is expected to quicken the pace of growth in 2010. Emerging regions, which now account for half of the total market, will lead the way with double-digit growth for 2010 while mature markets are also expected to make steady gains. Desktop shipments will be roughly flat in 2010, while portable PC growth of 18.1 percent will continue to drive overall volume gains. The commercial sector is expected to rebound in the second half of 2010. Mini Notebooks will continue to grow, but at a slower rate, as the introduction of new ultra-thin portables will generate new growth points and limit the share captured by Mini Notebooks.

“Beyond stabilizing their business, PC vendors are trying to position themselves for gains as the market recovers,” said Jay Chou, research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker. “We’re seeing aggressive promotions and expect innovations leveraging new technologies, including ultra-thin designs, touchscreens and LED panels. The technology changes and efforts to stand out in an increasingly commoditized market will lead to further product and customer segmentation and add to the advantage of market leaders in covering the breadth of products, technologies, and market segments.”

Richard Shim, research manager for PCs at IDC added, “An aging installed base of PCs to replace, along with government aid and declining average selling prices are key ingredients in a recipe for resurgence of PC shipments into the commercial market segment. The combination of a recovering commercial market and a healthy consumer market will lead to double-digit shipment growth through 2013.”

Mobile apps surging

ABI Research expects application downloads to reach five billion by 2014. That is an increase from an estimated 2.3 billion applications downloaded in 2009. The growing adoption of smartphones, which saw sales rise 20 percent in 2009, as well as the proliferation of application stores, are the major drivers for this expansive surge.

“The iPhone’s share of the app market will contract from its 2010 level during the latter part of the forecast period,” said wireless research associate Bhavya Khanna. “The big beneficiary will be Android, which will see its market share of total application downloads increase from 11 percent of the market in 2009 to 23 percent in 2014. This rapid growth is driven by the mass adoption of the Android OS by both vendors and consumers from 2009 onwards. There are now more than 14 phones that run the Android OS, and many more will launch in 2010.”

ABI Research expects revenue from mobile app sales to decline by 2013, as competition will lead to downward pressure on application prices, and a greater proportion of “must-have” applications will begin to face competition from free or advertising-supported substitutes. This has already started to happen, with the launch of Google’s free turn-by-turn navigation service.