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 [...]

1st smartbook of its kind

Why first? Well, it’s sort of a cross between a smartphone and a notebook. Compaq Airlife 100 Android powered netbook was first shown in January on Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. It has a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 10.1 inch. 1024 x 600 pixel display, 16GB of flash-based storage, and SD card slot, 3G and [...]

Linkbook – a PowerPC smartbook

Vodacom South Africa has introduced a new smartbook in the market which runs on a Motorola PowerPC. The Linkbook features a 16GB flash storage, 256MB RAM, 8.9-inch TFT display (1024×600 pixel display), Wireless LAN and a SIM card slot for on-the-go surfing.

Call us a weird troglodyte, but we would prefer this over the Apple iPad. And why not, after all it has a built-in keyboard and runs Firefox! It is available only in South Africa for R199 ($26) per month with a 2 year contract, which includes 300MB per month data transfer.

Other specifications: Bundled social networking software, Flash support (but Youtube not supported) and runs Ubuntu 8.04.

[vodacom]

Lenovo Smartbook Postponed

Back in January, Lenovo announced its first Smartbook, the Skylight for the American market. It was said it would be hitting the shelves in the month of April (2010), but now the Fudzilla is reporting that the launch date has been postponed until July (2010).

Also, it is has been observed that most of the netbook players don’t have their nuts on the smartbooks and are doubtful about the success of these ARM-powered smartbooks.

Lenovo Skylight review

Tech correspondent of the Singapore Daily, Darry Kang was lucky enough to get his hands on the impressive Lenovo Skylight Smartbook. According to his initial impressions, the flash is supported by the browser but it is slow as molasses in January. Heck, it could not even playback a YouTube video nicely. This is a shock to us as in our review, the HTC HD2 (also powered by Snapdragon) that we reviewed sometime back did not show any lags when playing back a YouTube video. Let’s hope they fix this bug as-soon-as-possible because this smartbook is all about web-browsing.

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Quanta Smartbook in the tunnel

Quanta Computers, who have earlier worked with O2 Asia to make cellphones for them are going to produce a smartbook under its own brand! Being touted as “computer in an iPhone form factor”, this upcoming smartbook from Quanta will sport a 3.5-inch touchscreen display and will posses the ability to make phone calls too.

Right now, folks at Quanta are in talks with ARM and Qualcomm about the processor that should be used in it.

Marvell Smartbook packs Armada

Marvell is showing off its ODM smartbook at the CES 2010. It is powered by an Armada 510 CPU that has the capability to play back your 720p videos smoothly.

Equipped with a 12.1-inch display, this smartbook runs the mighty Ubuntu operating system. But that is not the most interesting part. What made us a fan of it is its $200 price tag. Marvell says that it would run for 4 hours on a single charge.

Lenovo Skylight Smartbook coming in April 2010

Lenovo’s first Smartbook, named Skylight will be making its debut in the month of April 2010. It will be available under AT&T’s contract. Terms and conditions of the contract are not yet known.

Learn more about the Lenovo Skylight

Freescale Smartbook prototype announced – can play HD videos!

Freescale has unveiled its new smartbook prototype design – a tablet with a 7-inch touchscreen display that docs with a keyboard. Since it is a smartbook, it uses Freescale iMX515 processor that is based on ARM-infrastructure.

It runs Debian Linux and weighs less than 2 pounds! Measuring just 200x128x14.9cm, it features a resistive display. While Freescale could have gone with the capacitive one, it restrained itself to resistive to keep the overall cost of the Smartbook as-low-as possible. The price tag of the WiFi only version is going to be $199. Expect a bit higher price for the 3G+WiFi version.

It has a 4-16GB SSD, single USB port, micro-SD slot, webcam and headphone jack. There are two buttons – Back and Menu on the left of its display.

The Freescale Smartbook, which has not been given any name yet, worked with the Canonical – the people behind Ubuntu and ThunderSoft to create a widget environment so that people find Linux easier to use. The Smartbook includes ATi’s HD decoder. Since there is no mention of HDMI port on it, it makes less sense to play HD movies on a small screen.

Freescale is also considering Google Android for their Smartbook.

Meet the Lenovo Skylight Smartbook

Who better than Lenovo to start the Smartbook revolution? The Lenovo Smartbook, destined to make debut in April 2010, will be launched at the CES 2010.

This smartbook is not just any ARM powered netbook. It is powered by the 1GHz Snapdragon CPU from Qualcomm that is already being used in high end HTC and Toshiba Windows Phones and we have heard that it is mighty fast. It has a vivid 10.6-inch display and runs Linux. Let’s hope that it means Chrome Linux because that is exactly what we have been hearing about the Skylight from the past few months – see this and this

It has 20GB of solid state storage and 2GB of cloud storage which is meant for storing the data online. Also bundled is a 8GB miniSD card. There are 2 USB ports too for pluging-in your peripherals.

Update: Now confirmed that it is using Lenovo’s customized version of Linux, not Chrome OS.

Update2: resolution is 1280×720 and comes pre-loaded with mountain of widgets including Amazon MP3, Gmail,

It packs Wi-Fi and 3G (via AT&T) to make sure you are always connected while on-the-go. Battery is internal and will be priced at $499. A bit too expensive for a Smartbook, if you ask us.

[Learn more about HTC TOUCH HD 2 1GHZ phone at Windows Phone Mix]