I don’t usually spend Saturday morning reading investor presentations and I can’t even remember how I got here but it’s interesting to look at the 22 April 2008 investor presentation from Archos. The personal media player company sees a migration to MIDs happening in the next 2 years. They also say that there is only one Internet, it needs a minimum 5″, 800×480 screen, that the MID market will 70M units in size by 2010. They also highlight to trends.  1) 3G is all-over in Western Europe and 2) Ultra Low Power X86 processors are becoming reality and that mobile devices will run standard PC applications in 2009.

There are no presentation notes or audio accompanying the slides here so I’m having trouble putting that last statement into context. Did Archos imply that they will have to follow the ‘reality’ and run standard PC applications? I.e. Go X86? Or did Chief executive Henri Crohas talk about the Archos’ competitive advantage in this X86-based market when he showed that slide? The Archos 5 has just been released and its based on a ARM/Ti platform but this product is probably a result of 18 months dev work. The low power X86 platforms didn’t exist then. They do now though so if Archos believe that the PMP market is evolving to a point where the Internet aspect is more important, would they switch CPU architectures?

Images taken from Archos Investor Presentation. 22 April 2008.(PDF).

I do believe that the X86-based platform has more potential both from the software dev and technology aspects and I’ve made predictions that Archos could move to X86 in the past but there are some changes happening in the market and unpredictable forces out there. An expensive decision like this needs to be low-risk to keep investors happy so I don’t believe that they’ve already made their decision.

Ti are putting a lot of effort into promoting their OMap platform, Nokia are looking to continue with ARM/Linux and there are others important players to consider too. Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia all have products that could affect the market. On the other hand, Archos have just released a new product and have time before they need to make a decision on a new platform for their next product.

It would be in interesting market indicator if Archos switched to X86 but I guess we’ll have to wait a while before we find out.