Chapter 7: Creating Mobility-Aware Longhorn Applications

Overview

Mobility is another major theme of Longhorn. Laptops, notebooks , and Tablet PCs are specific and identifiable hardware form factors that support scenarios distinct from those supported by desktop PCs. Mobile PCs comprise a large and growing segment of the overall PC market. Mobile PCs make up about 30 percent of the worldwide PC market now, and the segment is growing more rapidly than desktops.

In absolute terms, shipments of mobile PCs in the United States and Western Europe have increased year after year, whereas desktop shipments have declined. ^[1] Given that laptops cost more than desktops and given an economy in which the overall PC market is shrinking, the growth of laptop shipments and share is a striking and important trend.

The Japanese market is even more favorable for mobile PCs. In Japan, laptops account for nearly 50 percent of the PC market.

The latest forecasts from IDC and Gartner Dataquest (March 2003) agree that laptop share will continue to increase through the next several years . By fiscal year 2007, these forecasts show mobile PC share of 30 percent in the United States, 33 percent in Western Europe, and 56 percent in Japan. The forecasts also agree that this trend applies to both the consumer and the enterprise markets.

Applications should be written with mobility in mind for the following key reasons:

• Mobile PCs are a growing segment of both the enterprise and the consumer PC markets. The rapid expansion of wireless technology will only accelerate this trend.

• Laptops cost more than desktops: They are a premium PC product. The growing number of buyers who are choosing laptops ”who pay more despite getting less traditional capability ” demonstrates that mobility has real value.

• A significant amount of industry research and development is focused on mobile PCs, so the value associated with applications on these PCs should increase. Innovations in both hardware and software will yield to new and improved mobile PCs with low-power processors, innovative form factors (such as the Tablet PC), longer battery life, and improved performance.

Areas of ongoing investment for Longhorn mobility include the following:

• Anywhere wireless networking (the ability to move between wireless environments)

• Peer-to-peer collaboration

• Hot docking and undocking (easy and stable)

• Multimonitor support for docking and meeting room projection scenarios

• Improved power management (for longer battery life)

• Fast, consistent resume from standby

• Find me, hide me (management of notifications)

• Offline access and seamless synchronization of data

• Location awareness and location-aware services

Some of the fundamentals that software designers need to consider while designing applications for Longhorn mobile scenarios are power management, form factor (including docking/undocking and readability), and network awareness. Each of these fundamentals is discussed in the following sections.

^[1] IDC PC Tracker (June 2002).