[BRIEF NOTE] Netbook vs. Mobile

[rfmcdonald]

John Paczkowski, writing in Digital Daily, reports that neither Apple nor RIM expects the netbook to last.

Apple and Research in Motion may disagree on many things, but they are of the same mind when it comes to the netbook phenomenon: It will be short-lived. Asked about Apple’s interest in the category during a late-April earnings call, COO Tim Cook said the company has none.

“When I look at netbooks, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens,” he explained, noting that it’s “a stretch” to call a netbook a personal computer. “It’s just not a good consumer experience and not something we would put the Mac brand on….it’s not a space as it exists today that we are interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in. It’s a segment we would choose not to play in. That said, we do look at the space and are interested to see our customers’ respond to it. People that want a small computer so to speak that does browsing and e-mail, might want to buy an iPod Touch or they might want to buy an iPhone. And so, we have other products to accomplish some of what people are buying netbooks for and so, in that particular way we play in an indirect basis.”

Turns out, Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie feels pretty much the same way. In a recent interview with Reuters, he said the company has no interest in adding a netbook to RIM’s product line. The only netbook Balsillie is interested in is one “you can hold up to your ear and clip onto your belt.” In other words, a BlackBerry. Anything larger just won’t cut it, as a parade of discontinued nonphone portable hardware has already shown us. “These devices don’t work,” Balsillie said. “At the end of the day what we’ve really found is that if [customers] can do it on a BlackBerry that’s what they’ll want.”

What's coming? Balsillie, who's on the front page of The Globe and Mail with his plan to buy the Phoenix Coyots, is also on page 3 explaining where he thinks the computer market will go.

"If you want to see the next 10 years, just look at the next 10 months," RIM's co-chief executive officer, Jim Balsillie, said in an interview. "You can only see so far ahead, but you're just seeing a revolution happening right now and it's just so fast, you almost don't notice, if that doesn't sound like a paradox."

The Internet will remain an increasingly important distribution medium for digital media, but the range of faster mobile devices with larger screens and greater storage capacity that consumers can use to access the Web is enabling a host of new ways to get music, movies and other information on the go.

However, smart phones don't simply offer a new medium to experience content. Software applications are giving users more control over what they can do with their mobile phones than ever before. Apple's App Store, an online marketplace for games and other software, reached a billion downloads in less than a year.

By combining various functions - linking social networking with GPS or marrying music services with the ability to buy concert tickets, for example - these devices and applications are changing the way people communicate and interact with media.

"The best parallel that I use is when they first came out with motion picture projectors, the whole thought of those was, 'Hey, now I can do a stage play and play it at a different location at a different time,' " Mr. Balsillie said. "The concept of a 'movie' wasn't in anybody's mind at the time because they couldn't see how the media could change the nature of the entertainment.

"In the case of smart phones, we're just time- and place-shifting some of the applications. Will it actually change the nature of the application? Absolutely. Do we know exactly how it's going to change it? I don't think so."