Never mind the netbook, here comes the smartbook

ARM chip vendors tout emerging category at Computex; Intel says the term 'confuses'

If you still blanche at the term "netbook" for being an ungainly piece of vendor-speak, then prepare to be nauseated later this year as "smartbook" supporters start to bang that marketing drum.

What exactly is a smartbook, aside from a term drawn from the the obvious blend of "smartphone" and "netbook"?

[ Related: Qualcomm is showing off at Computex an Eee PC smartbook running Android. | Check out other news from Computex Taipei. | InfoWorld's Randall C. Kennedy asks, "When does a netbook stop being a netbook?" | Stay ahead of advances in mobile technology with InfoWorld's Mobile Report blog and Mobilize newsletter. ]

First mentioned last November in a speech by a marketing executive from hard drive maker Western Digital, a smartbook will be a computing device similar in size or slightly smaller than today's netbook with smartphone-like features.

Glen Burchers, consumer marketing director at Freescale Semiconductor, says those features could include all-day battery life, instant-on capability and "persistent connectivity," and specs such as an ARM-based chip core, a Linux OS version like Google's Android, and, most importantly to consumers, a price point significantly lower than today's netbooks.

"We fully expect $199 devices with 8.9-inch screens, Wi-Fi, full-sized keyboard, 8-hour battery life, 512MB of RAM and 4 to 8GB of [solid-state] storage by the end of the year," Burchers said.

By comparison, the cheapest netbooks based on Intel's Atom CPU, such as Hewlett-Packard's just-announced Mini 110, sell for under $300.

Intel successfully pushed the industry to accept the term "netbook" last year to describe the then-emerging class of mini-notebook computers that, for the first time, were offered at discount, rather than premium, prices.

Intel's Atom CPU and its closely associated graphics chipset now dominate more than 90 percent of the netbook market. And the last shadow hanging over the use of the term netbook was lifted on Monday with the announcement by Intel that it had settled the trademark lawsuit brought by handheld computer maker Psion.

As upstarts to Intel's near-monopoly, Freescale and fellow ARM silicon vendor Qualcomm, argue that the term netbook simply does not do justice to the merits ARM-based netbooks will possess versus Intel-based netbooks.

"While "netbook" is not a bad term, it has really come to mean a mini-notebook that uses an x86 chip and runs Windows," Burchers said. "There's a need for a product category that fits between a smartphone and a netbook."

Intel spokesman Bill Calder differs.