Trademark battle won over by Qualcomm for name ”Smartbook”
Qualcomm coined the term Smartbook a few years ago and this is to describe those mini laptops at the size of a netbook that use smartphone chips and has 3G capabilities. It also offers internet access that is always on and it boasts of an all day battery capacity. Then a company named Smartbook AG that was selling laptops of the same name complaint that Qualcomm violated the trademark. Straight to the present and it seems like the German Patent and Trademark office was in favor of Qualcomm. Well, good for them but the fact is that the term never really caught on in the market and the products never caught on either.
In 2010, a bunch of popular brands like Lenovo, HP and Toshiba showed devices that can be called smartbooks themselves. Among all the offerings, the Compaq Airfile was actually the only one that was sold in the market and the others never made it to production or were never geared anyway as a smartbook. The smartbook was introduced before the craze for tablets and now that manufacturers and tech consumers are on the tablet rage, it seems like there is really not much room for smartbooks, or, not at all.
Well some companies seem to be exploring this area until now. NEC introduced their “smartbook” that uses the NVIDIA Tegra 2. The Motorola Atrix 4G can be docked on and be transformed to a laptop and these do not even use the Qualcomm chips. Anyways, Qualcomm does not seem to really mind it anymore that they won that case since, well, only a handful really cared for it in the first place.
Via netbooknews
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