The coming Android super-swarm

Stick computers spell doom for Intel, Microsoft and the PC.

In 2013 Android, which has moved steadily from mobile phones to tablets and set top boxes, seems poised to enter a “swarming” phase where dozens of manufacturers will release hundreds of devices, creating new markets and swamping (even destroying) established ones as it does.

To see what I mean, just: search Google for “Android Mini PC” and take a look at a few of the products that are available. These devices, which I'm calling “stick PCs” for short since they all have a USB-stick form factor, mostly run a current or near-current version of Android, but on some of them you can install Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, ported by enthusiasts.

To take one brand as an example, the Rikomagic MK802 series has been used as a home media center, a smart displays for commercial events, for home gaming on the TV, for internet browsing (not just websites, Twitter and Facebook, but also enough oomph for YouTube and Google Docs). Enterprising users hook up USB cameras and run Skype — yes, the whole family sitting comfortably in front of the TV, chatting on camera to relatives on the far side of the world.

Android mini PCs — an evolutionary frenzy

The stick PC market is in an evolutionary frenzy. From its first appearance in mid 2012, the MK802 brand has seen five different generations in six months: MK802, MK802+, MK802 II, MK802 III and now MK802 IIIS. No sooner does a feature such as Bluetooth appears in one product than it spreads to all the others. Single core CPUs (Allwinner A10) have given way to dual core CPUs (Rockchip RK3066), and quad core CPUs are on the very near horizon.

Though often marketed as set top box replacements or home media centres, stick PCs are fully-fledged general-purpose computers, with CPU, GPU, RAM and flash memory. Connectivity usually include a couple of USB ports, and HDMI port. wi-fi and often also Bluetooth.

Bolted to a desktop monitor, stick PCs can be controlled with USB mouse and keyboard; plugged into your TV they can be controlled by infrared or Bluetooth keyboards and mice. Some of the later models can be controlled by apps on your Bluetooth-enabled Android mobile phone, a feature I expect to become universal in the next few months.

A typical spec includes a dual-core Cortex-A9 (an ARM7-class processor), ARM Mali or Imagination PowerVR graphics, a gig of RAM and four or eight gig of flash. You’ll note that these are mobile phone specs — last year’s mobile phone specs to be exact — and there’s no doubt that these devices are sourced at small marginal cost. Of course, since stick PCs are generally not mobile but attached to a TV or monitor and fed from a power lead plugged into a mini-USB port, the limiting factor is heat dissipation, and they could easily manage an A15 or even higher CPU and more powerful GPU.

Stick PCs will kill the established PC market, from the bottom up

Now that the first generation of digital TVs are moving out of the living room and into the bedroom, replaced by ever bigger and better sets, why buy your kids a new desktop PC when they can plug a stick PC into the TV in their room? For the price of a decent spec desktop running Windows 8 you can get a stick PC for every member of the family. And no more losing your files on an old, slow hard disk that has to be regularly backed up: services like Google Drive, Flickr and Google Docs provide pretty much everything the home user needs, only more conveniently.

Those who’ve been around computers for a while will recognise that with the stick PC, Sun’s Network Computer idea has finally arrived on the scene, only a decade or so late. At the time, Sun got the details wrong and was unable to build such a machine for less than the cost of a much more highly specced desktop; today, dozens of Chinese manufacturers have already succeed.

Intel, so far almost completely absent from a mobile phone market ruled by Android on ARM, is now suffering due to recession in the traditional Wintel desktop market and the failure of its Ultrabook platform, eclipsed by ARM-powered tablets. Intel’s latest accounts show net income down 15 per cent year on year.

Indeed Intel seems to have seen the writing on the wall as it has just announced that it is leaving the desktop motherboard market. Its own foray towards this market, the Next Unit of Computing, looks timid and a little clunky in comparison. The best prices I could find for a NUC with no RAM in it was about four times the cost of a typical stick PC.

As for Microsoft, while all stick PCs come with media centre software, Microsoft’s entry in that market, Windows Media Centre, is only available as an add-on to Windows 8 Pro — you can’t even get it for the base-level Windows 8 product. At current upgrade prices, soon to be upped at the end of January, that will cost you £24.99 for W8 Pro, while Media Centre is then free for a limited period. And Microsoft’s entry in the low-power, tablet space? The crippled Windows RT.

People in emerging markets, whose first and so far only computer is an Android handset, may not purchase a traditional Windows or Apple PC at all. When and if they do need something more work oriented, they may seek the familiarity of the Android interface on a cheap stick PC, keeping the cost of the base unit right down and repurposing an existing TV. Ironically, Windows 8 with its new mobile-style interface legitimises the Android UI for desk work — surely not what Microsoft intended.

The implcations for Google itself are more nuanced. The writing may be on the wall for Google TV, as that market stands to be completely gobbled up by stick PCs. However Google can take comfort from the fact that every single one of the latest batch of stick PCs seems to incorporate access to the Google Play store — hinting that Google Play may be an invaluable asset for whipping into line the likes of Samsung and the no-name Chinese phone manufacturers who strip out links to other Google web properties and replace them with Alibaba.

Opportunities for others

Ironically, such turmoil could give an opening to the savvy and fleet of foot. Perhaps Imagination Technologies (LON:IMG) could persuade someone to produce a stick with an Ingenic JZ4780 SoC (dual core MIPS CPU plus PowerVR Series5 GPU) instead of the currently-favoured RK3066.

There might also, finally, be opportunities for some of the also-ran Linux-based OSes like Tizen (backed by Intel and Samsung) or Sailfish (all that remains of Nokia’s Meego effort), or Canonical with Unity on Ubuntu. Canonical, who are pitching at mobile phone makers, have had the idea that you will be able to plug your phone into a keyboard/monitor/mouse setup and use it as the heart of a desktop system, with installed software receiving notification that it’s now running on a larger screen, and changing its layour accordingly. You can see that such a system might be even more suited to stick PCs plugged into TVs than is Android.

Sun / IBM deal to collapse?

The hot news of the hour seems to be that IBM's bid for SUN is off — they couldn't agree on price. This possibility has been discussed at length in the tech press in the last few days, and the consensus is that this is going to be a disaster for SUN: Schwartz has supposedly hawked it around the whole world looking for a buyer, and (supposedly again) no one expressed interest apart from IBM.

The fear is that, now they know that SUN's top managment has effectively admitted it's unable to return the company to profitability, both customers and employees may haemorrhage away. Some have even hinted that this was IBM's game plan all along — which is not an impossibility, since that used to be Microsoft's favourite trick.

There is perhaps, however, one last, desperate hope: Cisco. The investment boards are humming with the idea that SUN is a perfect buy for Cisco: it would give them an 'in' to the server market, which they have so very recently decided to enter. Hmm, Cisco's new boxes are all Intel I think, and while SUN has a substantial Intel business, its main line is of course Sparc. That said, Cisco is nothing if not an adventurous and technically competent company, and if they decided to run with the Sparc heritage, you might end up seeing a version of the chip ending up in their routers :)))

Sparc has long been almost a millstone round SUN's neck. I'm not quite sure why. ARM has made a major success of a non-Intel chip, with an enormous number of licencees busily fabbing away and integrating it into their custom designs, and I know that SUN has been willing to make the IP available to fabricators in what seems to me a similar way (the devil's in the details though) but so far, only Fujitsu has taken it up. Maybe they were myopic about targetting the architecture at the server market: maybe they should have focused more on scaling Sparc down as well as up. They did that a little bit, aiming it at multi-chip webservers, but perhaps they could have gone a bit further than that.

Whatever. It's now looking, with the benefit of hindsight, as though Java has been an enormously costly mistake for SUN. Not that it hasn't been a very successful platform — it has. But because they've never managed to make more than small change from it, while it's sucked up an enormous amount of management (and, in the early days, legal) time and effort that would perhaps have been better spent on SUN's core competencies.

I say that with a good deal of regret, and as a fan of Java. And of course, it didn't look like that in the early days. Java, originally developed for set top boxes, came out at a time when Microsoft ruled the desktop even more than now, when Microsoft had all the mind share, and when it had started to stop making versions of Windows for desktop and server class processors other than Intel's. The worry was that a Microsoft future would be an Intel future, and that Sparc would go the way of MIPS. Java then, with its virtual machine and processor-agnosticity, was a way of keeping Sparc in the game. But somewhere along the line it got too important, and SUN ended up chasing a mirage.

The brave investor then, might wait for SUN to fall below $4, even as far as $3, and then buy in the hope of a Cisco offer. Or even the hope of the board kicking Schwartz out the door, which would be bound to have a salutary effect on the share price, even if only temporarily.