Qualcomm’s Push Into Netbook — Sorry, Smartbook — Market

imageQualcomm is moving into the netbook market, launching what it calls smartbooks — devices with a full keyboard and screens up to 12 inches, containing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset which was designed for high-end phones. Luis Pineda, senior vice president of marketing and product development at Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM), “described a smartbook as having the “intuitive ease of a smartphone” and being “always on, always connected to 3G [and having]the long battery life and all day usage” of a smartphone…”What differentiates the smartbook from notebooks and netbooks is the user experience that we enjoy from smartphones into this larger display device,” Pineda said. “It will be a complimentary, secondary device” reports ZDNet UK. This strikes me as a strange comment, since the biggest complaint about most smartphones is generally how complicated they are to use.

Smartbooks seem to be aimed squarely at the netbook market, and represent Qualcomm’s desire to expand into other device categories. Pineda wouldn’t say which manufacturers are making smartbooks, but he did list the companies making devices based on Snapdragon: Acer, Compal, Inventec, Samsung, Asus, Foxconn, LG (SEO: 066570), Toshiba, C-motech, HTC, Quanta and Wistron. The devices will run a Linux operating system, and Engadget has some specs.

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