Never mind the netbook, here's the smartbook

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"?

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 Inc., 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 Inc.'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 4-8 Gigabytes of [solid-state] storage by the end of the year," Burchers said.

By comparison, the cheapest netbooks based on Intel Corp.'s Atom CPU, such as Hewlett-Packard Co.'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% 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 Inc., argue that the term netbook simply does not do justice to the merits ARM-based netbooks will possess versus Intel-based netbooks.

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