Sony Ericsson to enter into Smartbook market

Interestingly, another company is entering in the smartbook market and it is THE Sony Ericsson. Sony Ericsson, after having a not-so-great journey with their Windows Mobile smartphones (Sony Ericsson Xperia X1) have now started to concentrate towards smartbooks. According to the information given by a reliable Taiwanese source, the company is now working on a smartbook that will be released at the end of this year. No details about the specs have been made clear, what kind of specs it will have, but we suspect it to be a non-x86 device and will use ARM processors to run some mobile OS, possibly Android.

It will receive some quite healthy competitions as netbooks from other manufactures will be coming in galore too around that time period.

BenQ launches MID running Windows XP

BenQ has launched an Intel-Atom based MID in Taiwan. Since the MID is based on x86 platform, it is able to run Windows XP pretty nicely. The BenQ comes with an 4.8-inch display and will retail around $424 (NT$13,990). It is also being offered by a Taiwanese telecom service “FET” at $57 with a 3 year contract in which you will be able to enjoy the 3.5G (WiMax) speeds too.

According to BenQ’s general manager (Taiwan), they also have 4.5-inch MID in the tunnel that will be released in year 2010.

ARM executive says “Android not good enough for netbooks”

Every week, we hear a lot of manufactures that are going to use ARM chip+Android combo on their netbooks. According to them, this will help them to create cheap netbooks that provide decent web-experience on-the-go.

“I do think that there is more work that can and will be done to bring the things we love about Android into form factors (netbooks). Android is still optimized for smartphones,” said Kerry McGuire, director of strategic alliances at ARM

Frankly speaking, this is something we did not see coming. A lot of manufactures are working hard on releasing netbooks at the end of this year or early next year and if the Google Android does not behaves nicely on ARM-powered netbooks, it can be detrimental to the Android developers and the whole Android  community.

ARM processors are still not x86 compatible and thus do not have the ability to run desktop operating systems like Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. Although, it can run other popular OS like Ubuntu Linux and Windows CE  embedded, but those are not *enough* to make a lot of people buy non-x86 compatible products.

Best way would be using Android on Atom processors which are x86-compatible. Acer already has a similar netbook in the tunnel which will be released later this year.

RealPlayer Mobile coming to Linux netbooks

RealNetworks is soon going to release RealPlayer For Mobile for the Linux netbooks running Ubuntu (both ARM and X86) as-well-as for the upcoming instant-on Linux OS (Presto OS). To add icing to the cake, folks at RealNetworks claim that it would be able to play most HD video too. Of course, it would be hardware-dependent.

It will be able to play most of the audio and video formats out there. However, it won’t be able to play the DVD and FLV format (used in Youtube and Hulu videos).

They claim that it would be run WVGA (800 x 480) video silky smooth, but to get the 1080p video running, you will a Z530 processor with HD graphics accelerator.