How many hands?
Cycling helmets dotted the tables at the Thistle Marble Arch as the mobile phone industry braved a strike by London Underground workers yesterday to converge on the Open Mobile Summit and discuss the open mobile ecosystem. As opposed to the iPhone.
HEXUS.channel sat in on a panel discussion entitled Beyond the phone: devices in the open mobile age. The panel consisted of Ben Timmons, senior director of business development at Qualcomm Europe (who we subsequently interviewed, so watch this space), Aymar de Lencquesaing, president of Acer's smart handheld business group and Yves Maitre, senior VP of devices at Orange.
The discussion commenced with a statement of reality that is obvious but still worth making. Mobile devices are primarily sub-divided into those you can put in your pocket and those you have to carry in a bag. Or as de Lencquesaing put it: one-handed or two-handed devices.
Any talk of smartphones, netbooks, MIDs, etc is secondary to this and serves more to provide novelty than dramatic new functionality.
Timmons was quick to bring attention to a term Qualcomm is making a lot of noise about right now - the smartbook - primarily to describe PCs using its Snapdragon low power chipset. "A smartbook at a smartphone in a netbook form factor," said Timmons.