Lenovo focus on touch, Windows 7, onboard 3G for future netbooks

Lenovo's Matt Kohut has been fleshing out the company's vision of netbooks over the next five years, and the worldwide competitive analyst isn't shy of a strong opinion.  Key themes mentioned are nothing new but generally welcome: Windows 7, touch and multitouch, integrated WWAN connectivity and lower prices.

"Linux, even if you've got a great distribution and you can argue which one is better or not, still requires a lot more hands-on than somebody who is using Windows. So, we've seen overwhelmingly people wanting to stay with Windows because it just makes more sense: you just take it out of the box and it's ready to go" Matt Kohut, worldwide competitive analyst, Lenovo

As other netbook companies have suggested, Kohut believes Windows will remain the predominant OS as opposed to Linux.  Windows 7 will only increase that dominance, bringing with it both the familiarity of a common OS together with new touch implementations; Lenovo themselves have been working on ways to augment touch and make it more suitable for smaller netbook displays:

"[O]ne of our focus areas specifically is how do we overlay on top of what Windows is offering certain things where we can bring up – if you are going to bring in touch, how do we overlay common tabs so that now we can enter numbers, how do we make the keypad bigger, for example, for that certain thing?

And that's been a huge area of focus and we've had a lot of ideas, everything from, "who says you should just have to use the predefined gestures, why not make your own, so that when you gesture a circle, it launches your e-mail client for example?" Matt Kohut

Somewhat controversially, Kohut suggests that larger display sizes are also a likely trend to continue over the coming years.  Traditionally netbooks have been viewed as sub-10-inch devices, but Kohut believes vendors will shift to offering larger panels together with SoC based chipsets intended to lower cost and manufacturing complexity.

[via Slashdot]