PC Tablet Design & Manufacturing in Taiwan

The Qbe Story: Pulling together the best of 3 continents.

Taiwanese high-tech engineering and manufacturing, American marketing and European design.

Client: Aqcess Technologies, California
ID, ME and Tooling supervision: WeLL Taiwan
Managing Director WeLL Taiwan 1996-2000: Case Engelen

The first generation

The story starts in when journalist Mr. Prichard of California had an idea for a new kind of computer, that he could use when traveling around the country to write stories. The problem with notebooks is that it is only portable computing, from one table to another. He needed something that could be used when standing or walking around: mobile computing,
So with a small team of friends he wrote a business plan and succeeded in getting venture capital to fund the development and start the company under the name Aqcess. He asked a big US design firm to do the design and the engineering, and a small notebook manufacturer in Taiwan to do the EE development.

As happens more often, there were a lot of communication problems between the 2 developers, and the design firm did not seem to have much experience in notebooks. The results was that on Comdex '98 a mock-up was shown, but they were unable to produce it because no attention was paid to thermo, EMI shielding or manufacturability.

Case Engelen, at that time Managing Director of WeLL Taiwan, visited the Comdex to see the latest trends in computers, and got talking with the people from Aqcess. Tom Patton of Aqcess was very surprised and said "I was just looking for the best design firm in Taiwan to redesign this product for me". Because of the problems with the first generation product it became clear that the Qbe had to be redesigned from the ground up, starting with a whole new motherboard, because the current board would soon be outdated. This meant that Aqcess had lost not only all the investment in development so far, but also a year in market opportunity.

Better solution: total development in Taiwan
To avoid further communication problems it was decided that the whole development would be done in Taiwan, and that WeLL would do the project management.

One possibility that was researched first was to use an existing motherboard, to save cost and time, but after a lot of searching it turned out that the spec for the Qbe was so demanding and innovative that no ready-made board could be used.

A spec based on research

The good thing about being on the Comdex show with a prototype was that Aqcess had received a lot of customer feedback. I turned out that the users that where most likely to buy the Qbe where the so-called vertical markets: doctors walking around in hospitals, insurance agents, warehouse workers etc. Having a well defined group of end-users was very useful for the designers to make a product that was specifically targeted.

Further, Aqcess realized that being a small, unknown company it would be a big job to get enough exposure in the market. One of the most cost-effective ways to become famous is to use PR, and to get the product endorsed by important computer magazines. Of course, to make PR work you need ot have something to show that really catches the readers imagination.

To win the comparative test in the magazines Aqcess examined all products on the market that it would be competing, and decided it had to be the best on every criterion: if the best competitor had a 12" screen the Qbe should have a 13.1" etc.

The reasoning was that professional buyers would just buy the best product on the market, with the most features, so that for example the doctor would not loose any precious time because of a missing feature on his PC tablet.

This way the Qbe got everything that you can think of: a card reader for E-commerce, a modular video camera, a hot-swappable device bay, extra batteries for extended usage, a speed-step CPU...

A drawback of giving it all these features was of course that the Qbe would become relatively heavy and big, but the company followed a clear strategy: "Best of the test"

WeLL recommended to make the new Qbe in magnesium, to give it a really high-end, professional look, and make it very rugged (magnesium is 20 times stronger than plastic). We decided to use a Taiwan molder who mastered thyxo-moulding (semi-solid injection), which gives a much better result than die-casting, where bubbles in the surface are often a problem.

The players

The European PM, designers and engineers worked closely with our favorite team of Taiwanese engineers, who already had some experience in magnesium notebooks. From it's side Aqcess had appointed Tom Patton as its project manager, he had the task of integrating all the different opinions from the Aqcess people in the US, and spent about half his time in Taiwan.

Finding a suitable manufacturer was not easy, firms such as Quanta and Arima require a minimum monthly volume of 5K, and as a start-up it was hard to convince them that this was possible. Finally Aqcess choose for Innolabs, an EE consultancy that had just become part of the Kuo Feng group.

For a normal notebook design you already need a very good interaction between all the parties involved, and especially for a new product as the Qbe, with its innovative wedge shape, it proved to be of vital importance that everybody: ID, ME, EE, tooling, Manufacturing and the client, were able to sit around the same table to discuss all the different issues.

The set

To facilitate use of the Qbe we invented the Porticle: a stand that doubles as a port-replicator. By bending the Porticle's clever mechanism the Qbe is able to stand both in portrait and landscape mode.

We further developed the Qbicle, a docking station that when the Qbe is not there can still be used as a stereo to play CD's.
Further accessories included an ultra-thin keyboard, and a battery charger.

The work

On earlier projects in Taiwan Case Engelen had experienced that just coming over for a week to show a mock-up of the design is not enough, the designers really have to be present during the whole process. Things often change during development, for example: an LCD panel is suddenly out of stock and has to be replaced with one that is 2 mm thicker...
Normally a Taiwanese engineer in a rush to get the project done would just have stretched the shape a bit to make it fit -more or less OK- ("cha bu duo" in Chinese, anybody who has worked in China will be thoroughly familiar with this expression)). With our designer there to discuss the problem the shape was adapted in a way that still kept the original spirit of the design.

Everybody worked extremely hard, often till late at night, one engineer even worked three days in a row without sleep!
But in the end we made it: 50 working samples, all CNC'ed out of magnesium, where shown on Comdex, 9 months after having started the sketches.

Comdex, done the right way

Aqcess knew that this time they had to make a fantastic impression on the market, and establish itself as the leader in a new category; the PC tablet. If Comdex would be a failure, then the company would go bankrupt because money was running out... there was a lot of pressure on the development team.

So in true American style they went full out and did everything right: they embarked on a very strong PR campaign, established relations with 84 journalists, got a nice booth with a very interesting, museum-like design, built a great website, hired a big limo for VIPs, gave a big party... in total they invested about US$ 1.2 million in the Comdex.
And the results came: PC Week awarded the Qbe "Best of Comdex", with runners up being HP and Sony! The little boy had beaten the giants. Bill Gates and a couple of VP's visited the booth, and listened very interested to Aqcess' president, eager to learn about a new category of PC's. The website received about a million hits after the show and all the publicity generated by the award. Later on the Qbe was placed in numerous magazines such as Stuff and T3. The Qbe even got published in Business Week for having won an award of the US designers association (IDSA)