India driving demand for development of all day connectivity laptops

London, August 13 : Dell, Inc. considers the demands of the Indian workforce to be a major factor behind why it has had to develop laptops with significant new features.

The company has predicted a significant rise in the demand and sales of its new laptops, due to their significantly higher battery life than the existing machines, in the near future.

"The majority of people coming online and buying their first computer today are doing it in emerging countries like China, India and Brazil," the BBC quoted Andy Lark, Dell's vice president of global marketing, as saying.

"If you look at India, about 67 per cent or more of their workforce is going to be entirely mobile and that is driving the demand for new features in the laptop like all day connectivity, long battery life, high-level security and uncompromising design and durability," he added.

While unveiling 10 new laptop models aimed at the emerging working class, the company said that over one billion laptops could be sold in the next five years.

"There is no business as usual in the connected era," Lark said.

"Boundaries for businesses are virtual. This is a new class of worker who maybe doesn't have an office and who maybe visits 10 offices in a day and visits several different customers," he added.

Highlighting the fact that the company had shipped 53 million Latitude laptops since 1994, Lark said that the ranks of the digital nomad were swelling as were expectations about the functions their laptops and notebooks could perform.

The company's new laptops include seven Latitude business laptops, and three Dell Precision workstation laptops.

Jeff Clarke, senior vice president of Dell's business group, describes these products as "performance leaders and something the tech community will absolutely die for".

The computers have just under 10 hours of battery life, and it can be extended with a so-called "battery slice" to total 19 hours.

Besides battery life, security was the other big concern, said Clarke.

"With 17,000 notebooks being lost, left unattended or reported missing at airports around the world, many with important information on them, our customers asked for the notion of a vault to secure their information," he said.

Dell said it had done that by including the ability to track down or disable the device if it was stolen.

The machines also have a fingerprint reader and a "control vault" processor that stores an owner's identity and credentials on protected hardware.

Clarke believes that such features will help the company to boost its position in the laptop market.

ANI