New Smartbooks Ready to Give Netbooks a Run for Their Money
Thursday, January 7, 2010 8:51
The netbook faces a challenge this year as the highest growth category in the personal computer market by a younger upstart—the smartbook.
Smartbooks make their full debut this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Freescale, the chipmaker heralded their arrival with the launch of its reference design for the category.
The name signifies the marrying of smartphones and netboooks in a smaller laptop that has advantages over a netbook. Smartbooks feature all-day battery life, constant internet connectivity through the 3G phone network, rather than relying on WiFi hotspots, plus lower costs that will encourage operators to offer them free to subscribers.
Smartbooks’ arrival could put Intel and Microsoft, dominant in hardware and software, on the back foot. Microsoft is not providing an operating system to run on the new machines. Intel, whose Atom processor has dominated the netbook category, is not a contender in smartbooks.
Smartbooks will run on microprocessors based on designs by the UK’s ARM, simiar to those used in the majority of mobile phones. The category is being promoted by wireless and graphics chipmakers such as Freescale, Nvidia, Marvell and Qualcomm, which have been unable to grab a significant share of the netbook market.
They enter the gray with PC makers calling on their smartphone expertise as they find that ever-smaller machines attract consumers. Notebook sales have overtaken desktop PC sales in the consumer market. Netbooks are the fastest growing part of the notebook market. Improved battery life and performance in a new generation of netbooks running on Intel’s Atom microprocessors could blunt the impact of smartbooks. The new devices are late arriving; they should have gone on sale during the holiday season.
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