The chip giant announced delivery of dual-OS at CES 2014 with PC partner Asus, with the PC maker delivering the laptop/tablet hybrid to run it on: the 2-in-1 Transformer Book Duet TD300.The TD300 lets you switch between Windows 8.1 and Android in either slaptop mode, using an Instant Switch button on the laptop or a virtual key on the tablet.The PC features an Intel Core i7 processor with Intel HD graphics.Intel’s chief executive Brian Krzanich announced the dual-OS capability at the tech show in Las Vegas.Krzanich called the platform a response to customer and OEM demand, with both wanting the option to run Windows 8.1 and Android at different times on one device.“Intel [SoCs] are the only ones that can offer that capability to seamlessly switch between OSs. You don't have to make a choice moving forward. You could have a secure environment, you can have both,” Krzanich said.Intel isn’t the only chipmaker straddling Windows and Android.AMD used CES to announce what it called its latest milestone: putting Android and Windows on the same tablet, working with Android vendor BlueStacks.
BlueStacks creates a virtualised Android device that runs on the Windows desktop. You download, install, and run apps inside a BlueStacks window.AMD said the new version of BlueStacks is running on fourth-generation AMD APUs – the partnership with BlueStacks was first announced in September.Android apps can run within a window or at full-screen resolution, apps can be downloaded from various Android app stores and synced between different devices, and Android apps can access files stored inside the Windows file system, AMD said.Steve Belt, corporate vice president AMD product management, said in a statement that users who had apps and services on in the Android and the Windows camp no longer faced device-specific restrictions thanks to BlueStacks.Now users have access to all the apps - games, communications and content consumption - they love on their Android mobile devices right at their fingertips, while getting important productivity tasks or high-end PC gaming accomplished on their Windows PC, he said.
Devices capable of running Windows and Android are unlikely to prove anything more than a niche concern, but anything will help the chip makers in the today's tab-tastic environment.Intel is taking a hammering from the continued drop in sales of the traditional PC running Windows while newer Microsoft tablets using Windows 8.1 aren’t making a dent.Android, meanwhile, has by far the single biggest market share, chiefly thanks to Samsung.For Intel at least, a chip-set capable of booting Windows and Android will hopefully mean it can skim some of the cream off the Android growth that’s doing some of the damage to Windows and PCs.Newbie CEO Krzanich in November warned of zero revenue growth for Intel in 2014 compared to 2013 – despite having spent billions of dollars on, among other things, building new, power-efficient chips like Atom and Haswell supposed to help Intel break into devices.
Can Google’s Chromebook become the laptop platform of choice during 2014? Probably not, but there’s certainly demand for it. According to US market-watcher NPD, during the 11 months from January through November 2013, the platform’s share of the computing device market had risen to 9.6 per cent from just 0.2 per cent in the same months of the previous year.By contrast, Apple’s laptops accounted for a mere 1.8 per cent of the market in 2013, down from 2.6 per cent the year before. Windows-based laptops also declined, though they remain the biggest seller: their combined share fell from 42.9 per cent to 34.1 per cent.Do the sums, and that means Windows laptops took 75 per cent of the US notebook market, Chromebooks 21 per cent and Apple a measly four per cent. Some 6.6 million laptops were shipped through commercial channels, says NPD, of which just under 1.4 million were Chromebooks. Five Chromebooks were sold for every MacBook.
Of course, MacBooks are four to five times more expensive than the average Chromebook – $1,000-plus against around $200 - so the gains for the various devices’ respective manufacturers isn’t the same. But the numbers show that punters are not only continuing to buy laptops despite the rise of the tablet - NPD’s numbers show unit shipments up 24.5 per cent year on year - and that they like the idea of only paying a few hundred bucks for one.At that price, owning one in addition to a tablet isn’t perceived as a barrier. Punters can have both. With so much data existing outside the machine - and so many applications centring on data creation or, rather, file creation - there’s no longer any real concern that the device you pick up doesn’t contain the files you want.What Chromebooks appear to be doing is winning that part of the laptop buying audience that might once have snapped up a netbook. Netbooks were arguably killed off by tablets, but the form-factor’s smaller-than-a-notebook limitations arguably had as much to do with it as the rise of the iPad.Early netbooks came with Linux, but that bamboozled folk who felt they needed Windows as a security blanket. Windows, in turn, upped the netbook specification - a big hard drive rather than a small amount of Flash; a faster, more battery pummelling CPU - and a higher price. The screen and keyboard were too small for most grown-ups too.
Tablets showed that size need not be a problem for the kind of casual, browsing- or communications-centric jobs a lot of folk use computers for at home.HP’s problems sorting out a major charging bug in the released-then-withdrawn Chromebook 11 aside, there are already a handful of alternatives on sale. Some are from HP itself - Pavilion Chromebook, Chromebook 14 - and others from Samsung and Acer, not to mention Google’s own Chromebook Pixel, though this is considerably more expensive.More are coming. Dell will have its Chromebook out later this month, Sony’s Vaio VCC11 is expected in the spring, and Toshiba has shown one off at CES too that’s due out until February. Asus is said to have a couple in the works. At CES, Lenovo US president Jay Parker told CNET the company will have “multiple Chromebook models” in the market by the Summer.Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony and Toshiba - that’s essentially the world’s key laptop makers other than Apple and, as the numbers show, in the US Apple really isn’t that big a player.“We believe the market will accelerate greatly in the next 12 months,” said Parker. “I think Chromebooks can be very impactful in the market really quickly.”
Of course, that’s what all these companies said about the netbook. This time round, they are offering systems at netbook prices with notebook form-factors. That’s one of the key netbook failings addressed.As for the other, Windows, now that punters have grown accustomed to alternative operating systems through their experiences with iOS and Android, they’re clearly far more open to the idea of having a laptop without Windows than they were in the middle of the last decade.“The presumption that desktop Windows is ‘most familiar’ [to users] no longer applies,” says Jeff Orr of ABI Research, a market watcher.Google is a very strong brand and so many people now use its online services.Market analyst Gartner reckons Chromebook sales will hit 4.79 million worldwide in 2014, rising to 8.0 million the year after. It says 1.84 million of the machines shipped in 2013, so you’re looking at 160 per cent growth this year - well in excess of any other platform - and 66 per cent the following year.
CES 2014 The Las Vegas-hosted 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is still running, of course, but the majority of the announcements have been made: a fair few before the show even started, in a bid to get ahead of the rest. Like early morning shoppers, though, everyone figures out the pre-show press release trick soon enough and now everyone is back to square one. What next? CES announcements in October?Not that the world’s consumer electronics and technology players had a lot to say that was new. Smartwatches and wearable devices have proved the key theme of the show, with lots of folk jumping on the bandwagon to try and get a piece of the action early, now well-known birds like Fitbit and Pebble have been enjoying.It helps that Apple’s much-rumoured entry into the market has not taken place, probably for the same reasons that Samsung’s effort, the Galaxy Gear, was so poor: they’re trying to make a flash gadget that will wow non-techie punters, but the core hardware - the battery, chiefly - just isn’t there yet.CES is always a showcase for wall after wall of tellies, but there has been little novelty this time round. Curved screens have been done, so too have 4K and beyond Ultra HD TVs. Smart TVs are so 2012. Steve Jobs may have figured out the secret of making TV hardware sexy again just before he died, but no one else has in the intervening period.
Intel went to town on Ultrabooks a couple of years ago, but the broad public apathy to the new platform resulted in a more modest showing in 2013. This time round, rather than start its own bandwagon a-rolling, the chip giant just did what everyone else has: it jumped on someone else’s, in this case wearables. Whether an Edison platform, a PC-on-an-SD-card based on the new Quark processor, will truly be suitable for wearables - in other words, able to deliver ARM-level power efficiency - remains to be seen. Announced now, it won’t be out until the summer.So what did stand out? Here are some of the items that struck me, and don’t forget you can also check out El Reg’s complete CES 2014 coverage here.We’re a sceptical lot here at The Register and we’ve found it hard to accept that personal 3D printing has much of a future outside the homes of Shoreditch techno-hipsters and a few, more advanced makers. Until now. Additive manufacturing is now truly correctly named, after 3D Systems has announced a printer for printing sweeities.