Netbooks are almost synonymous with small, light and underperforming notebooks sold at low prices. In the fourth quarter we will see a new category of ”netbooks” on the market, under a new brand, smartbooks. The common among these smartbooks is that they all use the ARM architecture instead of Intel’s popular Atom platform and it wants to show that the heritage from the smartphone market works here as well.
There is a reason for the new name tough, as covered in our previous reports;
The reason is that netbook, even if it is an acknowledged term, has been tainted by the early models that were very slow. Qualcomm wants to get a fresh start with the smartbook name and instead remind people of the powerful smartphones instead, whether this will be a successful PR coupe remains to be seen.
As expected, several ARM hardware platforms will appear soon, among them Qualcomm’s SnapDragon and NVIDIA’s Tegra processors.
The first smartbooks will make an appearance in Q4 2009 and they will come in from many directions; Acer, Foxconn, Compal, and Pegatron all have models coming. Companies will sell units both under its own brand and by outsourcing.
Focus is on the 8.9″ format but also 10,1″ models are rumored. The operating systems are yet to be revealed, but some form of Linux distribution will be used by most of them.
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