Panel: Smart consumer devices market to explode

PORTLAND, Ore.—Consumer electronics is on the brink of a "smart devices revolution" according to the consumer electronics panel members at last week's Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando, Fla. According to members of the panel, the elements necessary for such a revolution have been maturing over the past decade and will begin to blossom by the 2010 holiday season now that the global recession is receding.

New media tablets and smartbooks will soon be flooding the market, according to panel moderator Jeff Orr, senior mobile devices analyst at ABI Research. Orr predicts that more than 163 million media tablets and smartbooks will be shipped in 2015.

Panel members backed up Orr's predictions, adding the these new consumer devices will not be running Microsoft operating systems on Intel processors like today's computers, but instead will use smaller, cheaper, lower power ARM-based microcontrollers running open-source variants of Linux.

"The long term is wild exciting—I look forward to dethroning Intel as number one semiconductor supplier—there are huge opportunities for billions of smart mobile devices," said Glen Burchers, consumer segment director at Freescale Semiconductor Inc. "We were hit by the recession, which clearly slowed down development, but for the current year I expect to see tens of tablets and smartbooks, with clamshell and sliding keyboards, to be introduced in the next few months."

ARM, likewise, has been maturing over the last decade, but has now surpassed the mainstream computer microprocessors from Intel for the low-cost and low-power needed by mobile devices, according to Warren East, CEO of ARM Ltd.

"It takes six to 10 years for a new architecture to fully blossom," said East. "But now we have all the technology ingredients from which a new era of content consuming devices will be built."

Open-source software has also been maturing for the last decade, and now has passed Microsoft in keeping up with usage trends, according to Michael Kress, senior director at Canonical Ltd., a provider of support, engineering services and hardware and software certification for the Linux-variant Ubuntu.

"We are taking the best of all the open source software available today and bringing it together into a single platform. Linux continues to evolve, coming out with a new version every six months, unlike Microsoft which is much slower to respond," said Kress. "We think that Linux is the one—with Android, Amigo and Ubuntu leading the smart devices revolution."