Embedded 3G laptops 'to cover less than a third by 2011'

Laptops with embedded 3G or WiMAX will not have a huge part to play in the mobilebroadband market in the near future, it has been claimed.

According to a report from Disruptive Analysis, these laptops will be used by less than a third (30 per cent) of worldwide mobilebroadband subscribers.

Instead, the external USB modems known as 'dongles' will cover nearly twice as many, with 58 per cent.

"Mobile-embedded notebooks are very elegant in concept - but suffer from practical and business-model limitations that will restrict their near-term growth, especially during a period of economic uncertainty when buyers will be especially conservative," said the report's author Dean Bubley.

But looking at the longer-term picture, this situation will change, with 150 million global users of the laptops by 2014, while 100 million will be sold annually.

The report also claimed that there will be slow near-term growth in Mobile Internet Devices, with just 3 million sold next year but ten times that amount bought in 2014.