Smartphones and Netbooks Share DNA, but There’s a Missing Gene

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We’ve talked time and again about how functional you can be with a smartphone or if it can be a computer replacement. And when you want a bigger screen, desktop software functionality or need to type more than 10 words at at time, we often turn to netbooks.  In ways I hadn’t thought of, the two are closer than kissing cousins, says Stacey Higginbotham. She’s referencing an EE Times article that compares the cost and complexity in each of the two device classes.

It never occurred to me to examine the integrated circuit footprint inside a smartphone and a netbook, but that’s what EE Times does. Their example above shows rising complexity in smartphones as costs of traditional computing decrease. In a sense, we’ve seen this trend for the past few years, but I’d equate it to more capable smartphones approaching acceptable and usable levels of computing.

This quote from the EE Times piece offers an interesting conclusion, but I think it’s missing a key point:

“Netbooks and smart phones occupy adjacent niches, but they will not truly compete head-to-head until the form- factor differential and the discrepancies in power consumption are reduced or eliminated.”

I don’t disagree on the form factor challenges; I’m not sure I want a much bigger smartphone, nor do I want a smaller netbook. I’m on board with the power efficiency bit as well: My ARM-powered smartphone easily gets me through a day, but x86 netbooks aren’t there yet. Both are good points. But what about applications and software?

The two device classes run very different types of software: On a smartphone you’re hard-pressed to compete with similar functionality on a netbook. Don’t get me wrong, as there are many very capable applications in the smartphone world. If there weren’t, do you really think that some of you would be spending more than $200 on smartphone software? But there’s still a large gap between applications on the two devices. It is shrinking, but it’s far from closing. Unless EE Times is envisioning that we’ll run everything through cloud applications, I think they’ve overlooked software as the missing gene in the shared DNA between smartphones and netbooks.

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