Intel’s biggest competitor is now Qualcomm

by Scott Bicheno on 25 June 2009, 07:00

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM)

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Enter the smartbook

The culmination of all this integration is Snapdragon, which is low power enough to be used in smartphones, but high performance enough to run netbook sized devices.

Except Qualcomm doesn't like the term netbook, perhaps that has something to do with the fact it was coined by Intel, and it's hoping the term smartbook will catch on.

"What we're seeing now is that people are using those chips for a couple of things that we think are new," said Timmons. "The first one is what we're calling ‘smarter smartphones', and the Toshiba TG1 is the first example of this, which is a very thin, very powerful smartphone, but with the kind of battery life performance you would expect from a phone.

"Beyond that we see the emergence of a new category of device, that we're calling smartbooks to differentiate them from netbooks. These are more like a smartphone in a netbook form-factor. A smartbook is really focused on communications functionality.

"So it's always on, always connected and being used primarily as a communications device, as opposed to a computer that you happen to connect every now and then. Critically, we're delivering the kind of battery life performance that means you don't have to carry a recharger with you during the day."