New laptops offer 3D graphics and solid-state disks (Feature)

By Sven Appel Feb 24, 2010, 5:08 GMT

Hanover, Germany - A rash of new laptops set for display at the CeBIT computing trade show underline the growing shift in the market to tinier machines with fancier features such as 3D graphics.

Taiwan-based Acer will be at the show with the Aspire 5740D, which will retail in Europe for 800 euros (1,090 dollars). Thanks to a special coating on its 15.6-inch screen, users who wear polarizing spectacles can see the third dimension when they play movies.

Experts say 2010 will be the year that 3D becomes widely available on notebook computers.

Thomas Rau, who writes for the German version of PC World magazine, says, 'It's good for gamers, because they can sense distance better.'

Users don't even need to buy movies and games made in 3D, according to Robert Perenz, Acer product manager. The Aspire can compute a near-3D image for games designed for DirectX 9 graphics and higher.

'It can also recompute 2D films, though it is not quite as impressive as a made-for-3D film like Avatar,' he said.

In Germany alone, Europe's biggest marketplace, mobile computing is huge, accounting for 8.7 million of the 13.1 million computers sold last year, according to digital industry federation Bitkom, a sponsor of the CeBIT fair.

The overall figure was a jump of 900,000 from 12.2 million in 2008, proving this part of the industry is nearly recession proof. The March 2-6 fair is mainly directed at trade buyers of business software and computer componentry.

Convergence, the linkup of computers and home entertainment, is again visible this year with the release of laptops that can be used to play HDTV movies on televisions. Stefan Hollaender, Sony marketing director, says that is why notebooks need Blu-ray players inside.

That is why notebooks often have a jack at the back to connect to a big-screen TV.

Ulrich Jaeger, product manager at Toshiba Germany, says he is a bit surprised that shoppers are demanding not only Blu-ray players, but also Blu-ray recording capacity in laptops. He said this does not make a huge amount of sense, since it is easier to save a library of movies on a cheap external hard drive.

'Perhaps they want to make discs of their vacation HD films to give to relations,' he speculated, pointing to steady sales of HD camcorders.

The best news for notebook buyers is that prices are fairly stable at the moment, whereas the features available for the same money keep on getting better. The faster DDR3 processors are spreading to ever more machine, as are Intel's newest Core i5 and i3 chips.

Toshiba's Jaeger says he does not see four-core processors coming to regular notebooks any time soon.

'Quad-cores are mainly only needed in high-end gaming notebooks,' he said. Bitkom said in a briefing it expected solid-state drive (SSD) data storage to keep spreading from netbooks to bigger notebooks. An SSD is completely non-mechanical, with no whirring disk, and is pretty jolt-proof. But they are not expected to take over either.

'The SSD is still too expensive,' said PC World's Rau. Most buyers prefer a conventional hard drive, with common sizes now ranging round 320 or 500 gigabytes.

Then there are touch screens. The expression has been inescapable since the Apple iPhone came along. Last autumn there was a rash of desktop computers which could be controlled by pinching and flicking one's fingers over a touch screen and the guessing is that the first notebooks with the feature will show up this year.

Sony's Hollaender observes that it may take a while to catch on: users will have to see an obvious advantage in it. Controlling an app phone by gestures is a delight, but when a user already has a keyboard and mouse, another interface may seem a bit superfluous.

Jaeger says that particularly in Germany, buyers are becoming more discriminating and are demanding higher quality in notebooks.

'A lot of shoppers are buying their second laptop or even their third. They have a pretty shrewd idea of what features really matter,' he said.