driving the ultra-mobile enterprise

Now is a great time to be in the market for new portable machines to outfit employees. Never has there been such a wealth of available computing platforms, device categories, and downright desktop-competitive notebook systems to cater to a broad audience.

Today, I will take a look at three different categories that are now defining the mobile sector. These three categories are by no means that only ones available to businesses to choose from, but they offer the widest range of possibilities from a business perspective.

Netbooks

When ASUS basically invented the “netbook” category with the original ASUS Eee PC 4G, most saw the notebooks as toys that were only meant for kids or general consumers who didn’t need much power to run heavy duty applications. However, over the spread of a year, the category has exploded to become the fastest growing segment of the notebook market.

Much of that gain can be attributed to numerous companies like Acer, MSI, Lenovo, Dell, and HP jumping in to grab a portion of the market; however, a lot of those gains can be placed at the feet of Intel. The company’s tiny Atom processor has given netbooks competitive performance in a tiny form-factor — couple this advantage with impressive battery life and you have a cost-effective solution for small businesses.

With most netbooks offering 1.6GHz processors, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drives, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and WWAN options, the tiny machines make suitable partners for employees on the go and they won’t slow anyone down with their sub-three pound frames. The machines are more than adequate for most productivity duties and can even handle light photo editing. With prices around the $300 – $400 mark, they also provide a cheap way for mobile professionals to get a near “full-size” laptop experience without the full-size bulk.

Ultra-portables

Before netbooks came around, the ultra-portable category usually described notebooks 13″ or smaller that were light, easy to carry, and came saddled with ridiculously high price tags. Now that netbooks have come in to blanket the low-end sector of the market, ultraportables not only continue to occupy their place near the upper limits of pricing, but they have also extended further down to the $1,500 and below market.

13.3″ ultraportables seem to provide a nice balance for mobile professionals as that makes their frames slightly larger than the 10″ netbooks flooding the market and affords larger and far superior keyboards. The increase in size also allows the notebooks to offer larger screens with higher resolutions than the Microsoft-imposed limitations of 1024×600 for netbooks running Windows XP Home SP3.

The larger frame also gives manufacturers more space to include features that corporate customers often crave. For example, Lenovo manages to cram a 13.3″ screen, full-size keyboard, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, WWAN/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/WiMAX/WUSB, an integrated optical drive, SSD, and a fingerprint scanner into its ThinkPad X300/X301 series. Lenovo offer similar features in its slightly smaller and significantly cheaper X200 series.

Corporate customers enjoy such features in a notebook and the sturdier construction coupled with a relatively lightweight frame may be enough to sway some from netbooks which use cheaper materials to achieve bargain basement price points.

Desktop Replacements

Notebooks have surpassed desktop in sales worldwide, and while netbooks have part of the reason for the explosion in sales numbers, we can’t overlook the importance of desktop replacements. Desktop replacements, which often weigh seven pounds or more, have closed the gap between desktops and notebooks with regards to performance.

Whereas netbooks and ultraportable make sacrifices in outright performance to reach weight or cost goals, most desktop replacements make no such concessions. Since these machines are built to sit on a desk most of the time — with the occasional field use — they don’t have to be particularly thin or lightweight. In fact, most are bulky machines with enough space to cool desktop caliber hardware.

Take Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds for example. This 11-pound monster can be equipped with a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Core Extreme Processor QX9300 and up to 8GB of DDR3 memory. But it doesn’t stop there; also available are fast NVIDIA Quadro graphics processor with up to 1GB of onboard video memory which are paired with a massive 17″ WXGA+ display. Speaking of displays, the W700ds also has a secondary 10″ display which slides out from the main display.

Other niceties include dual hard drive bays, a built-in WACOM digitizer and multiple wireless radios.

Notebooks like the ThinkPad W700ds prove that you don’t always have to skimp on features when opting for a notebook system. While choosing such a desktop replacement means that you will have to give up some portability, such systems will leave few wanting more power to get mission critical tasks completed in an efficient manner.

For business out there, there are plenty of notebook solutions out there to keep your employees working at peak levels no matter where they have to travel. I have only detailed three such sectors of the notebook space, but there is bound to be a category that directly suits your needs. In fact, some companies may find that a combination of solutions from each category will suit different employees and different divisions almost perfectly.