Spot the market
The term ‘smartbook' will by now be a familiar one to regular readers of HEXUS.channel. For those of you in need of a reminder, it's effectively a netbook form factor, but using a chipset made by a member of the ARM ecosystem, such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon or NVIDIA's Tegra, which promises to require much less power than the current processor of choice in mini-notebooks - Intel's Atom.
The main advantage of having a much lower power processor, in theory, is that the battery can last all day, thus enabling it to be carried around with the same disregard for power leads and recharging as we already experience with mobile phones.
Hence the name - a smartbook is being positioned as the hybrid of a smartphone and a netbook.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that 15 OEMs, including Acer, Samsung and LG were developing smartbooks based on Snapdragon and NVIDIA's Tegra head-honcho reminded HEXUS.channel recently that there are around 50 design wins for Tegra.
However, not everyone's convinced. It's been widely reported that Jerry Shen, the CEO of the maker of the first netbook - ASUS - told an investor conference "currently, I still don't see a clear market for smartbooks".
This is particularly poignant as, to date, ASUS manufacturing subsidiary Pegatron has been one of the first to produce smartbook. Maybe Shen is put-off by the fact that the ARM instruction set can't provide the full Microsoft Windows experience. The return rates on the first, Linux based EeePCs were apparently quite high.
Then again, maybe he can't relate to the kind of needy, egocentric exhibitionist that Qualcomm seems to think will be the core market for smartbooks - as implied by the Qualcomm video below.
