Yet another PC category – smartbooks
The PC line continues to splinter into sub-groups. The netbook is getting a smaller cousin called the “smartbook“. Most netbooks use the Intel Atom chip and run Windows XP Home. The new category uses a different, less-powerful processor called “ARM” and is likely to be Linux based. It will be cheaper and even more mobile than the netbook. The New York Times Bits blog describes the smartbook:
At the Computex trade show next week in Taipei, a whole crop of new mobile computers will go on display, and the devices will share one major thing in common. They’ll use a variant of the ARM chip architecture rather than Intel’s Atom chip as their main engine. It’s a trend that Matt Richtel and I wrote about in April.
The companies making the ARM chips, like Qualcomm and Freescale, have teamed up to try to wrestle the netbook moniker away from Intel. They want PC makers to describe the ARM-based devices as smartbooks.
The ARM-based smartbooks should be selling for less than netbooks and they will have much longer battery lives — around eight hours as opposed to two hours. Of course, the battery life comes with some major trade-offs. The ARM chips have less computing power than Intel’s Atom, and rely on the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft’s Windows.
We may be getting closer to the inexpensive Internet appliance I have been hoping for. However, as the next post discusses, Microsoft may have other ideas.
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