If you measure the power used by a netbook PC when it’s in standby, a frozen unusable state, it uses around 500mW of power.  Leaving a netbook on with WiFi connected in an idle state with the screen blanked, maybe with an email program polling occasionally, you’ll see about 10 times the power usage. In PC terms, 5W is impressive but if you go to the smartphone world and take a look at the figures there, there’s a huge huge gap that needs to be tackled. As smartphones become tablets, become smartbooks, there’s a threat that ‘always-on’ becomes ‘must-have’ and that X86-based devices will struggle to compete in casual computing scenarios.

Smartphones are designed from the ground-up around the concept of ‘always-on. From the moment a smartphone is conceived, every element of the design has to be checked for power consumption which is why a smartphone can sit connected to the GSM telephone network drawing power consumption levels lower than 50mw. That’s 1/10th of the power consumption taken by a good netbook when it’s in a frozen state. Impressive.

But what happens when you connect a smartphone to the internet ? You can use cellular data services to achieve a good rate of connectivity by switching on UMTS for example. Switching to WiFi on a typical smartphone brings faster connectivity and, in a lot of cases, lower power that can be done on cellular networks. A smartphone can run a multitasking operating system and remain connected to internet and voice networks in well under 500mw of power, the same as it takes a netbook to sleep.  In fact, the best smartphones are running in this configuration for over 24hrs on a 5Wh battery which is an amazing 100mw of power usage. Turn on some background internet activities and it will jump to an average 200mw!

What happens if you take an ARM platform that’s in the same processing power category as a low-end netbook. Put it in a 10” screen form factor and do the same test? Actually, it’s the same as a smartphone. The only difference between a high-end smartphone and a smartbook with a 10” screenand a huge battery is the screen itself and when that is off, there’s practically no difference at all.

To prove this, I took one of the most powerful mobile computing platforms in a large 10” form factor device with 32GB of storage, 1GB of RAM and integrated WiFi. The device has a 23wh battery (about half that of ‘6-cell’ netbooks. The device is the Acer Iconia Tab A500 Android tablet which runs honeycomb. I connected to the Wifi (at 54mbps) and left the device connected with the screen off while it did it’s stuff in the background. Marketplace checks, email checks, Twitter checks and even some GPS usage by Google Maps. A weather service was running, the volume was set to silent and Bluetooth was turned off.

Over a 48  hour period with a few screen-on moments for checking progress (and a 10 minute in-use period as my daughter grabbed it to use a paint program)  I measured 46% fall in battery usage of which 5% was due to screen-on time. Take away the screen-on figure and you have 209mw of power usage.  The Acer Iconia Tab is nothing more than a smartphone inside!

‘Always-on, Always Connected’ will be a ‘Must-have.’

Always-on tests are interesting because it’s a hands-off test that people think only applies to idle smartphones.  In fact, it applies to many computing scenarios. With location, polling, sync, presence, alarms, push updates and of course, cellular voice and messaging becoming the norm in the hand, they will also have appeal on the desk. Not having to wait 5 seconds for a machine to start-up, another 5 seconds for a Wi-Fi connection and another 10 seconds for tweets, emails and other features to catch up is annoying.  There’s also a bunch of other screen-off, connected activities that are interesting. Servers for example. By that, I mean computers and gadgets that serve information to the Internet. This doesn’t just cover web servers. Think about internet-connected weather stations and web cameras, in-car data storage and notification systems. Then there are the devices that just don’t need big screens; Connected musical instruments. Digital cameras with 3G. Internet Radios. Low-power internet connectivity is important for these devices.

Related: Social Netbooks and ARM’s Lock-In Netbook Opportunity.

Summary

The point here is not to highlight that ARM is better than X86, it’s to highlight the gap. This gap is currently a huge advantage for ARM-based platform designers.

• The first point is, if manufacturers using X86/PC architecture don’t get products to market with active standby soon, with the help of Intel (the only X86 player trying to tackle this problem) customers will have a chance to experience, and may not turn back from, ARM-based always-on products.
• The second point is that this is a screen-off gap. Current screen technology is killing ARMs advantage in the ‘in-use’ scenario where screens are larger than 7”. It reduces the ARM advantage from 20x in idle to about 4x with a 10” screen being backlit. When the devices CPU is being actively used, the advantage drops even lower to around 2x. [Acer Iconia Tab – 4W. Samsung NC210 – 8W)
• Finally, the Acer Iconia Tab A500 is a good example of low-power internet connectivity. It’s likely that other devices in this ARM tablet segment hit the same figures.

Keep an eye on high-end ARM-based platforms over the next year or two. Honeycomb and iOS are leading the way into the professional space with their software and application ecoystems and you might find that this always-on advantage starts to lock people in soon.

We’ve had ARM-based mini-notebooks and tablets for years and in recent months we’ve even had the chance to test out some new, high-powered arrivals. The Netwalker, Wirelession 1060, TouchBook and many more. The potential has always been there to make a killer product but no-one has executed correctly yet. The Mobinnova Beam gets close but there’s a lot missing from the OS on that one.

The Dell Mini 5 and Apple iPad might change that and in the world of 4-10” ultra-mobile devices are likely to be the biggest sellers this segment has seen for at least the last 5 years. They combine some unique features over X86 devices that I discuss below. These niche-market devices may not see multi-million sales but there are still big opportunities.

Up at the 10”  netbook segment though there’s a well-established market for low-cost, portable, low-end internet-focused mini laptops. Netbooks have 40 million or more sales to-date and over 100 million sales predicted for 2013. Prices are low, battery life high, performance acceptable and even style is playing a role. Netbooks are just cool and very easy to justify. This is where ARM partners have a superb opportunity…in the Social Netbook.

ARM-partners aren’t in the netbook game yet but they do have a big chance if they use some unique weapons that Intel will have to think carefully about in their next-gen netbook platform. The ‘Social Netbook’ is a huge opportunity for ARM partners.

For the first time this week I finally saw an ARM-based netbook that executes well on what I think are the important unique and ‘lock-in’ features and the device slots neatly into a category of ‘social’ netbooks. Jolicloud beware because the Compaq Airlife 100 is good.

The 4 ARM-Centric Features of a Social Netbook.

1 – Point of sale

First of all we have the point-of-sale element. Selling applications, books, videos, music and other online services adds value to the customer and  value to the sales-chain which, in turn, can bring the price of a product down. Android, iPhone OS and other ARM-centric operating systems have proven that the model works and is important for the future. Windows-based netbooks aren’t POS devices. Intel and Nokia are working on this via their Intel Atom Developer Program and app-store framework but it’s in it’s infancy and needs a lot of marketing, development and commitment from OEMs before it becomes interesting for developers and customers. Point-of-sale is a lock-in feature.

2 – Location Based Services and Social Networking

LBS is becoming very big business and customers are starting to catch on to the idea of local search, local social networking and other location-based services. There ARE solutions for Windows-based netbooks but they are few and far between. Take Google Buzz for instance. The only way you can use the location aspect of this service is to use it on an ARM-based smartphone. Windows just doesn’t lend itself to these services and despite efforts to include ‘sensor’ support in Windows 7, developers are just not developing with this in mind. All the action for LBS is exclusively on ARM-based platforms using operating systems built with this in mind. Intel and Nokia do have a solution in MeeGo but like the Intel Atom Developer Program, it’s a long way away from developers minds right now. LBS is a lock-in feature.

As for social networking, although the majority of it still happens on the desktop, the growth in mobile social networking is phenomenal and combined with LBS is something that an Intel/Windows netbook just can not do right now.

3 – Dynamic User Interfaces.

What’s more interesting? A static workbench or a tailored ‘active’ screen with dynamic wallpaper, active widgets, finger-attractions, location awareness and a neat integration and interleaving of notifications from device and external services? Despite Windows 7 being capable of all these things, it’s not delivering a dynamic, exciting, social-centric experience. How many usable finger-centric overlay packages did you see for Windows 7?  What platform are developers looking at when they want to make a dynamic, mobile friendly UI?  The answer is simple. Most of the work is going into ARM-focused operating systems right now and you only have to look to peoples reaction to ‘Sense’, the UI layer from HTC to see what a difference it makes. Funnily enough, Windows Phone 7 Series won’t be offering tailored overlay layers either so in terms of dynamic, evolving mobile user interfaces, Android is in the best position possible. Again, MeeGo is tackling that issue but again, it’s a long way away from developers minds right now. Dynamic user interfaces are a lock-in feature.

4 – Always on.

I’ve left the best until last. Always-on is a killer lock-in feature and the primary trojan horse for ARM-based products. Always-on is not about in-use battery life, it’s about staying connected and active when you don’t use the device. It’s the smartphone usage model and it’s the reason that many of us, despite having laptops with us, will choose to browse the web or do an email on a smartphone rather than on a mobile computer. We’re simply lazy.

I first experienced this always-on computing model with a productive device back in 2008 with the WiBrain i1 which was able to achieve a nearly all-day connected usage scenario but it got hot, was a little temperamental and was hardly the most attractive design. Since then we’ve started to see netbooks achieving a regular 8-hour connected battery life and we’re moving to the point where that is going up to 10 hours with designs based around Pinetrail and Menlow but they are all 1.2KG or more, all have huge 6-cell (expensive) batteries and all use an operating system and platform that aren’t designed for the out-of-use scenario. With the current mobile operating systems you get always-on in a much more efficient manner (expect connected active-standby times in days on an ARM netbook) and the OS is designed for that usage model too. From core OS functions to notifiers and the ability to light lamps and buzz buzzers when necessary – even based on location. Users understand these OS’ as ‘always-active’ whereas with Windows 7, users are associating a desktop usage model and power-down after use.

Always-on usage is one of the best advantages ARM-partners have in this space and the primary lock-in feature for ARM-based netbooks.

And…

Also worth thinking about are casual gaming, in-use battery life advantages, weight, design flexibility (smaller, fanless designs) carrier channels and subsidization models.