New Mobile Term of the Day: Smartbook
Posted Wed, 27 May 2009 13:48:35 EDT by Philip Solis
Some netbooks will run PC OSs. ARM processors can run PC Linux OSs as well. ABI Research refers to these as PC-like netbooks. Some of the upcoming ARM-based netbooks will run mobile OSs, and ABI Research has referred to these as smartphone-like netbooks. These will have instant on capabilities the way smartphones do, will have always-on WWAN connections, and they are expected to have much better battery life - more like smartphones than today's netbooks. The term many ARM vendors want to use is "smartbook" - a combination of smartphone and netbook.
Many of the ARM vendors with Cortex-A8 and -A9 processor/platorms, especially Qualcomm, have been looking for a way to clearly separate these mobile OS-based products from today's netbooks. Today's netbooks are wrongly viewed as PCs by some, because they are just like PCs in so many ways. However, netbooks are clearly meant to be a lower-cost computing device that has some compromises and some advantages. Because of this, netbooks are sometimes viewed as PCs that aren't good enough, which is the wrong way to view them. Because of this, ARM vendors wanted to create a new label or these netbooks with mobile OSs so that consumers would understand that these are not like today's netbooks. Now their new term has been made public on Qualcomm's website, with a few variations of the URL, one of them being http://www.hellosmartbook.com.