Lightweight heavy hitters

AT a time when laptop computer sales are booming on the back of lower prices and bargains at the low end of the market, it's ironic that one of the most bouyant sectors is at the opposite end -- premium machines.

Various manufacturers disagree about what constitutes the high end of the notebook market -- some say it starts from $2000, others say it only kicks in at $3000, but more and more buyers are being enticed towards high-powered, high-spec portable machines as replacements for conventional desktop systems.

Depending on how high-end machines are defined, premium laptops are estimated to make up between a quarter and a third of the total laptop market.

The manufacturers, for their part, are working hard to meet demand for power, performance, connectivity and other features so that portable machines offer all that desktop machines provide, and in some cases more.

"The high end is going extremely well," Toshiba product marketing manager Justin White says.

"A few years ago, machines of more than $4000 were the top end.

"Like most areas of technology, however, performance has risen even as prices have fallen, and these days you can get a very high-specced machine for just over $2000.

"Sure, you can spend more, and the more you spend the more you get. If you pay more than $3000 or $4000 these days, you can expect to get everything and anything built in, ranging from tuners to Blu-Ray burners and more."

One reason the market for high-end machines is so bouyant is that buyers come from no singular particular part of the population.

Business people buy such machines for portability and power on the road, entertainment fans buy them for high performance in tasks such as games and high-definition viewing. As in all areas of technology, tech fans are always keen to get their hands on the best and brightest trends in gadgetry.

Toshiba's White says the trend to move away from desktop machines to portable devices is perhaps the main driver.

"A lot of people have been shifting from a desktop to a notebook over the past few years," White says.

"It is going beyond that now, though.

"Nowadays, many people are considering moving to their second generation of notebook machine, and when they do so a lot are looking for what they were missing when they initially made the move to laptops.

"Now they want notebooks that are just as good, or even better, than the desktop they gave up."

White says many of these were people who would not traditionally be considered power users.

"For a lot of people, it is all about wanting or needing high-capacity storage and efficient processing," he says.

"More and more people want to do things like video while they are out and about and on their holidays, and to be able to edit, download and show off their footage while they are still away.

"If you want to store or process large amounts of data, you need capacity.

"A lot of people think 150GB sounds like more than enough, but if you consider that many digital cameras these days, with resolutions of more than 8 megapixels at their best, require 5MB or so for each picture, not to mention digital camcorders, you end up using memory very fast."

Laptops are also becoming popular with gamers, as they look towards machines that offer strong graphics capabilities and fast processing to give them the best experience of new-generation games.

"When it comes to the games aspect, a lot of people want play the whole 3D first-person video experience at its best," White says. "They want better graphics cards and processing power to handle some very data-intensive programs."

Sony Australia Vaio channel manager Jun Yoon says business is still the strongest sector for premium laptops.

"For us, our strongest point is the business market. That is high-level executives, not mid-level, but business people who travel a lot," Yoon says.

"Portability is probably the most important thing for them, and a lot of research and development goes into making machines for them smaller, lighter, more robust and with a longer battery life. "The key thing is size -- say, 11in to 13in screens, light weight, and -- something that is often forgotten -- battery life.

"We have models with up to 11 hours of battery life, which is enough for a long-haul plane trip out of Australia.

"Business users also value the connectivity, particularly as people want their machines to be able to interact with so many other products and gadgets these days, and to have access to vital data back at their office or on the net while they're on the go."

This urge to merge portability with power has spurred the rise of at least one sub-category of premium laptops on its own -- the ultraportables such as Apple's MacBook Air and Toshiba's Portege R500.

"The Portege, for example, has everything that the bigger notebooks have, but they are lighter and have better battery life," White says.

White also agrees communication is a big driver in high-end portable machines.

"Being able to take them around and connect to the net is, after all, one of the chief purposes of notebook or laptop computers," he says.

"That means, as the machines get higher capacity, and the tasks they are meant to perform require more power, so must faster connectivity be provided through functions such as WiFi.

"If you have larger storage, having higher speed connectivity to networks and other computers is important, as is Bluetooth connectivity to phones and wireless services." Nearly all high-end notebooks these days come equipped with 802.11n connectivity, and most also feature Bluetooth connectivity to devices such as mobile phones.

Also fast becoming common, at least for high-end ultraportable machines, is 3G connection to enable users to hook up to the net using mobile broadband services offered by telecommunications carriers.

Good graphics cards are also important for business machines, White says.

"Instead of games or video, such cards are more necessary for business applications such as spreadsheets and CAD-CAM -- anything you need a lot of processing power to do," he says.

"Another feature on a lot of machines targetted at business is what is known as Active Management Technology.

"That is a facility for fairly large corporations that allows the information systems manager can remotely manage large fleets of notebooks, and update them easily."

Entertainment options are also becoming a signature of premium machines, particularly with the rise of high-definition, 1080p video broadcasting, recording, playback and applications.

Most high-end machines, particularly those with Blu-ray drives for playback and burning, offer HDMI, for example. "That means, if you are going to connect your laptop to a HD-enabled television, you only need the single cable for full HD 1080p output and digital audio," White says.

Yoon says Blu-ray is at the heart of Sony's high-end notebook strategy.

"Blu-ray is definitely a big push for us," he says. "It is the recognised format for high-definition, with HD-DVD falling out.

"Our high-end premium models can burn as well as play Blu-ray, and our Vaio range was brought out specifically to be the hub of our full range of televisions, games consoles like the Blu-ray-equipped PlayStation 3 and cameras and camcorders."

Toshiba, as one of the backers of the rival, and now failed, HD-DVD format, is perhaps unsurprisingly not as bullish about Blu-ray capability.

"People are not going over to Blu-ray notebooks so much, they don't necessarily want to use notebooks computers as players," White says.

"A lot of people are satisfied with the conventional DVD format for the moment."

When it comes to the engines driving high-end laptops, Intel's Core 2 Duo currently rules the roost.

"With the Core 2 Duo, you get better battery performance and processing performance, which is what such machines are all about," White says.

"That will let you render and compress big files faster than with other processors, and you also get better battery life.

"So, if you want to calculate large spreadsheets or do CAD-CAM or render video, you really want that extra power."

Yoon cautions, however, that when it comes to processors, the market always moves fast to keep up with the best available at any time.

"We change our chip sets every six months to keep up with the latest processors," he says.

Both Sony and Toshiba caution that the next big leap, a move to notebooks carrying Intel's high-powered Quad Core processors, is not imminent.

"Quad Core at this stage is really more a roadmap by Intel," Toshiba's White says.

"If you start looking at Quad Core, it is purely about performance and putting that performance into a notebook is a challenge.

"You are creating a lot of extra heat, for example, and you need to have a notebook specifically designed for it.

"I won't say we won't do it, but we're not planning it at the moment."

Yoon agrees. "Quad Core at this stage uses lots of power, which negates the type of battery life we want to be able to offer power users," he says.

"Down the track, the way the IT market works, once it is feasible for power and heat, it will be inevitable that Quad Core notebooks will appear.

"At the moment, the issues of power consumption, battery longevity and heat need to be solved."

Still, White says, once such machines do enter the market, notebook computers will rise to a new level of capability.

"Look for things like facial and gesture recognition," he says.