Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Let's start with a little TMI about the goings-on in my bedroom just before sleep. Warning: It can get raunchy, usually involves vampires these days and lasts nearly an hour. We've been watching an episode of "True Blood" on HBOGo each night. It's a bad habit, not exactly conducive to gentle dreams, but I have learned something very important about the will-be hot item at CES this year: Ultrabooks. They might make some people rethink tablets.
According to the Wired story I linked to above, an Ultrabook ...
must weigh no more than 3.1 lbs, be no more than 0.71 inches thick, and provide five-plus hours of battery life. Even more germane to the consumer experience, it must boast flash-based storage, and incorporate Intel’s Rapid Start Technology for speedy boot times.
Back to my nocturnal habits: At first, we watched on my wife's iPad. She would finish reading, I would too and generally we were, in the words of Kenny Rogers, too tired to sleep. And that iPad flips from a book to a TV effortlessly. But last month I bought a MacBook Air for work and did a really terrible thing -- I brought it to bed to finish up some emails. And when I was finished, we just flipped on a little "True Blood" on Mac's version of an Ultrabook to compare. Now my wife asks me to bring it to bed. (We're going to need an intervention soon.)
It is occurring to me that there's only one reason to have a tablet instead of an Ultrabook -- tablets are better for reading. But the Air is more comfortable for viewing, with its keyboard base propping the screen up nicely. And it's fast, the screen is beautiful, and in terms of mobility, the weight difference is negligible, especially factoring the iPad's cover. Plus, the Air is a fully functional computer for the rest of my needs.
This is all reminding me of the time, more than a decade ago now, when I carried two devices in my pocket. One was a cell phone that made calls. The other was my Palm, which held my schedules, was there to take digital notes, and could even sync my emails if I found a computer out in the world during my reporting assignments. (Man, that feels like the Stone Age.)
It didn't take a genius to wonder why those two devices couldn't become one. RIM's Blackberry answered, "you can," definitively and the rest is history now.
Something tells me we're going to have another round of that story. Tablets make sense as an entertainment and mobility gadget. They work for some kinds of business, but not those that need intensive written input. Ultrabooks will offer a powerful alternative -- all the functionality of your old laptop with nearly the mobility of your tablet.
I do agree with analyst David Johnson when he tells Wired, “While the ultrabooks are thin, light and offer instant-on convenience, the tablet will still have a place in the computer bag for reading, reviewing documents, and informal discussions or presentations.”
But the question about that computer bag will start to be similar to the one about my pocket, I suspect. Why not just one device?
This has been tried, I know, namely with laptops that became tablets with a twist and/or flip of the monitor. For reasons from durability to marketing, they've never taken off. Maybe something like a two-sided screen, with options to have both sides running or just one, would do better.
However it actually shakes out in the marketplace, there's something very interesting going on here. Just when it appeared tablets might one day drive a stake into PCs, Ultrabooks could prove they're not quite so dead after all.
