HTC to enter netbook market

HTC has received pretty good recognition and is now considered one of the most reputed smartphone manufactures. Now, according to the latest news bits, there are chances that it might try it hands in the (over-saturated) netbook market.

According to HTC CEO Peter Chou, they are very much interested in this category and they are looking forward to enter the netbook market.

I am pretty sure that we will see something very unique and exiting, if, in case, HTC does enter the netbook market. We have seen some really great MID-like smartphones from them. To name a few, HTC TOUCH PRO 2 and the latest one featuring a capacitive display like iPhone, the HTC TOUCH HD 2

Note that HTC did enter the UMPC market and they were not able to sell a lot of these UMPCs. HTC’s UMPC known as the HTC Shift was a disaster; costing more than $1000; ran Vista on a 800MHz processor!

Look out for our extensive HTC TOUCH HD 2 coverage at WindowsPhoneMix.com, our sister site about Windows Phones

Broadcom to develop an ARM-cortex A9 CPU

Broadcom, popular maker of computer chips has announced recently that they are working to make their own ARM cortex A9 processor. Right now, they have not said where this chip will be used, but we expect it to be used in Smartbooks: netbooks based on non-x86 platform.

A single core Cortex A9 is capable of delivering twice the performance of current crop of smartphones. When talked into the context of smartbooks, it can have upto 4 cores(!), making multitasking smooth and enjoyable experience

ARM to overtake Intel in Netbooks and Smartbooks? – We DISAGREE!

Currently, there is no doubt that Intel is the uncrowned king in the netbook market, but according to the market analysts, ARM will surpass Intel by the year 2012. According to this analyst, Intel-powered netbooks have started to become very expensive and cost more than $200 and offer just 3.5 hours of battery life. On the other hand, ARM-powered netbooks will cost less than $200 and will also last much longer: 8 hours.

Our take on this:

The comparison is baseless. People want Windows OS on their netbooks. They want to use their desktop apps on their netbooks for which they require Windows OS. Unfortunately, since Microsoft has already confirmed that it has no plans on bringing their desktop OS to the ARM-architecture, you are left with nothing but Linux or Google’s Chrome OS.

We believe that smartbooks can never surpass netbooks in terms of sales even if they are offered for less than $100. Clearly, they offer little advantage over the current slew of smartphones which do much more than emailing and web-browsing alone. Also, in their comparison, they said netbooks have 3.5 hours of battery life. Wrong as most of the netbooks these days come with 6-cell batteries which offer more than 5-6 hours of run-time with active Wifi usage. Looks like these analysts have been taking in account the netbooks that were released last year.

Intel and Nokia shake hands to create the next era of mobile computing

Today, Intel and Nokia announced a long term partnership that will “shape the next era of mobile computing”. Their new collaboration involves several open source Linux software projects.

both companies are expanding their longstanding relationship to define a new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks, enabling the development of a variety of innovative hardware, software and mobile Internet services.

It will be interesting to see what kind of innovations are made in the field of mobile computing. Nokia-book anyone?

No Blackberry netbook in horizon

RIM’s CEO has confirmed that they won’t be releasing a blackberry netbook anytime soon. This is not surprising as just few days back, he literally thrashed the netbooks by saying that since the Smartphones are more portable than netbooks, they will always rule over netbooks.

Instead, he says that wirelessly connected hardware like keyboards and secondary screens is something they will work upon. Stupid logic.

Palm Foleo project is not dead, Palm WebOS netbook coming – Foleo II

Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research says Palm is working on a netbook that will run WebOS. Yes, it is the same webOS that is being used by the Palm Pre too. In the year 2007, Palm had announced a linux-based netbook called Foleo that was designed to work as an extension of their smartphones. Sadly, it never was able to hit the shelves.

This new webOS device known as Foleo II is being designed by the three developers from Apple iPod Team. The rumored Foleo II will come with a highly capable web browser and email client; will have great battery life and will cost around $350-$400.

ARM netbook coming to AT&T

AT&T is soon going to offer ARM based netbooks running Linux OS. Glen Lurie, President of emerging devices for AT&T says,

“There are a lot of people who will dive in and build netbooks, including folks like cellular or wireless OEMs who never built a computer before. There will be a lot of innovation around what a netbook looks like and what the use cases are, and we will see this evolve very quickly,”

He thinks that the ARM based netbooks would do just fine as people are doing their work via Cloud-based applications and thus do not need a lot of horsepower in their netbooks. He also showed keen interest in the MIDs, which he refers to as “smartphones on steroids.”

AT&T is already selling four subsidized netbooks: Acer Aspire One, Dell Mini 9, Dell Mini 12 and LG X110.

PS: Lurie also manages AT&T’s relationship with Apple to sell the iPhone in the U.S.