Shopping for a laptop?

There are more choices to be made, and more to think about, because this year's laptops look and work a lot differently than last year's


In May, for the first time, the dollar value of laptop sales nudged past that of desktop computer sales - and it doesn't look to stop growing anytime soon. These signs of life in an otherwise sluggish market have manufacturers excited enough to show some signs of life of their own.

While desktops haven't changed much over the past year, except for sporting lower price tags, this year's laptops look and work a lot differently than last year's.

There are more choices to be made, and more to think about, than ever before when shopping for a laptop. That's the good news. "The bad news is,'' said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research, which covers the technology market, "there's lots of homework to do before you get to the store''.

Take one of the hottest technology areas this year: wireless Internet connectivity, or WiFi. The industry as a whole is moving toward making wireless connectivity a standard feature in notebook computers. But which flavour?

The loudest marketing push in the wireless arena has come from chipmaker Intel, with its Centrino brand, a package of mobile processors and wireless chips put together with notebook-toting road warriors in mind. But Centrino laptops support only the oldest and slowest WiFi standard, 802.11b. As a result, many laptop makers offer the same model of laptop in two configurations - one with Centrino WiFi hardware, another with a non-Intel-brand WiFi receiver that supports a faster standard called 802.11g (a few laptops opt for a third version of WiFi, 802.11a).

"The jury is still out on Centrino,'' said Brett Faulk, director of consumer product marketing for notebooks at Hewlett-Packard Co. One confusing factor: Centrino's strongest selling point is not WiFi but a mobile-optimised processor, the Pentium M, that's designed to stretch battery life as far as possible - but which is invisible in most Centrino ads.

On the other hand, battery life isn't at the top of many users' priorities, either. And that brings up one of the other choices that have to be made by laptop shoppers. While nobody complains about laptops that run for too long on batteries, the most popular laptops right now are "desktop replacements,'' deskbound machines that use power-hungry chips originally designed for desktops. These bulkier machines cost less than laptops with mobile processors; market research firm NPD Techworld reports that Intel Pentium 4 processors, made for use in desktop PCs, are now the top-selling chips in new laptops.

Heavier laptops allow for bigger screens, and sometimes wider ones as well. Though 14-inch screens were the dominant size for years, 15-inch screens became the norm this year. Then Apple broke a size barrier in the spring by introducing a 17-inch display - bigger than many desktop PC monitors.

Apple provides that 17-inch screen only on its top-of-the-line, $3,300 PowerBook, and the company wouldn't say if a display of this size would move further down its product lineup. But other manufacturers, such as Toshiba, are bringing out their own notebooks with 17-inch displays.

Laptop vendors are also starting to offer notebooks with theatre-proportioned wide screens, matched to the dimensions of most DVD movies. Dell and eMachines, two firms that offer these wider screens, argue that they will take off as consumers realise they make for a better fit on airline tray tables. But this is yet another area where it's too early to tell whether there's an emerging trend.

The shakiest would-be laptop standard these days is probably Bluetooth, a wireless technology that connects such gadgets as cell phones and handheld organisers to computers and to each other. Apple is still the only computer maker to show much interest in Bluetooth, and the technology is standard on most of the company's laptops these days. Dell offers Bluetooth as an option for an additional $49, but only five to 10 per cent of buyers opt in, the company says.

But the experimentation continues, and consumers will soon be presented with more radical options for interacting with their laptops. HP is about to unveil a Tablet PC for consumers; these lightweight, slate-shaped portable computers, which use a special version of the Microsoft operating system that lets users control the computer by writing on its screen, have primarily been marketed to business users so far.

At the other end of the (weight) scale, multimedia users are seeing the last distinctions between desktops and laptops disappear. DVD-recordable drives, once confined to desktops, are arriving in high-end laptops and will appear in cheaper models before long. And later this year, consumers will start to get sales pitches for more laptops running Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center edition, a variation of Windows XP that turns a computer into a TV, stereo and TiVo-like video recorder.

For all the tinkering, the average weight of new laptops has stayed about the same - it's just that there are more products at either end of the scale and fewer in the middle - where, theoretically, you might find a good combination of power and portability.

"Weights are becoming polarised: They are getting bigger and heavier on one end and smaller and lighter on the other end,'' said Michael Abary, director of business operation for the Sony Vaio product group. "We're not sure what exists in the five-to-six-pound range. It's either an area of opportunity or an area that will continue to be ignored,'' he said.

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