I've said for years that if Microsoft Corp. had gotten PC power management right the first time, there never would have been a Palm Inc.

Instead, the sorry state of Windows in the mid- to late '90s left a gaping hole in the market for Palm to walk right into. Notebooks, for all their horsepower, were utterly useless as Day-Timers, phone books or casual reference tools-for the simple reason that you couldn't resuscitate the damned things out of coma mode!

So now Microsoft has finally, finally conquered power management with WinXP. But one look around CES this month in Las Vegas will tell you that the genie is out of the bottle, and it isn't going back.

There were new wares not only from vendors of handhelds and accessories but also from mobile-phone hardware and service providers getting in position to capitalize on what they hope will be a replacement boon stoked by multimedia-ready phones tapping into developing 2.5G and third-generation networks.

But not everyone in Vegas is gambling that the Next Big Thing, or NBT, in wireless will be small enough to fit in your pocket. Intel Corp., for one, is betting big that good-ol' mobile computers will play a major role in the emerging wireless world. That bet is the juice behind Centrino, the just-announced name for the upcoming Banias mobile-PC platform.

It's not a bad bet, really. The desktop PC market is maturing-frighteningly so, for anyone whose fortunes are tied to the business. But notebooks and the supporting wireless infrastructure still have a long way to go before they attain the truly mobile ideal: systems that stay connected wherever they go, last all day on a single charge and don't sacrifice performance or features to make that happen.

In that sense, you could argue that mobile computing is still in its infancy.

Consider this scenario. More consumers today are developing a taste for mobile computing, thanks to the recent boom in wireless home-networking and entry-level notebooks. As they do, they'll find the $150-a-pound transportables that they picked up last year to be backbreakingly unsatisfying, mobilitywise. So they'll want more. Or, um, less.

That will spur a replacement cycle (remember those?), and this time consumers will tend toward smaller, more-portable systems. When consumers do, they'll connect more outside their home, using a more-fleshed-out wireless infrastructure. Then they'll crave more battery life. So they'll replace again. And so on.

Obviously, this is a long-term scenario that will live far longer than Centrino's inaugural processor, Banias. That's good! In a tech world overburdened by mature, slow-growth markets and a stable full of NBTs that haven't paid out, I'll take a segment with both near-term growth and long-term potential. Drop down a chip or two yourself.

Mike Feibus is Principal Analyst at Techknowledge Strategies Inc., a market research company in Scottsdale, Ariz., that focuses on components for mobile systems. Feibus, whose writings and quoted commentary have appeared in a variety of publications, was a principal and co-founder of Mercury Research, the foremost authority on pc components markets. He was a member of the launch team for market research services at In-stat and was a strategic marketer for Texas Instruments Inc. Reach him at mike@techknowledge-group.com.