“Smartbook” is the latest buzzword in the PC world, but exactly how well consumers are warming up to this new breed of laptop computer and whether it could become a new notebook segment remains to be seen, industry pundits said.
“The smartbook sector now is still in a blur,” Acer Inc (宏碁) product manager Sean Chang (張碩修) said in a recent interview.
Smartbooks are using a completely different platform from the Wintel (Windows-Intel) standard, so there are thresholds to overcome before Acer can move into the smartbook foray, Chang said.
“This involves a drastic change in the Wintel platform and it remains to be seen how well consumers will embrace it,” he said.
With screen sizes of between 5 inches and 10 inches, smartbooks aim to bridge the gap between smartphones and netbooks. Smartbooks are designed to be always on, just like smartphones, and connected to the Internet via third-generation (3G) telecom networks.
This way, e-mail is more likely to arrive automatically on smartbooks rather than requiring users to log on to the Internet to fetch messages. Also, checking out movie times, weather forecasts and posting to Facebook can be done in a matter of seconds.
Unlike netbooks and most standard laptops, smartbooks are not based on x86 microprocessors from Intel Corp or Advanced Micro Devices Inc, or the popular Windows operating system from Microsoft Corp.
The supporters of smartbooks are handset chipmakers making their first attempts in the laptop market. These players include Nvidia Corp, Qualcomm Inc, Freescale Semiconductor Inc and Marvell Technology Group Ltd, which license microprocessor designs from ARM Holdings PLC and combine it with their own technologies.
Taiwanese networking chipmaker Realtek Semiconductor Corp (瑞昱半導體) gives a thumbs-up to smartbooks.
“Smartbooks may eat into netbooks’ share,” said Amanda Lee (李文婷), Realtek’s project manager for marketing and planning.
This is because smartbooks sport a horde of easy-to-use interfaces and low-cost operating system, which could lure certain consumer segments, she said.
Dickie Chang (張祐菖), a PC solutions analyst at International Data Corp (IDC) Taiwan, disagrees.
When Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦) introduced the market’s first netbooks in late 2007 with only a seven-inch screen and a Linux operating system, people shied away from them despite the cheap price tag of US$400, he said.
If smartbooks are introduced in the same form and run on a non-Windows platform, there would be an interface gap for users, Chang said.
However, netbooks started to win over consumers with their low price tags, but gained more fans with Windows, bigger screens and hard disk drives.
In the third quarter of last year, netbooks accounted for 28 percent of all notebook shipments, doubling its share from a year ago, an IDC report released in December showed.
Netbooks are set to continue growth momentum this year, but at a slower rate, as the introduction of new ultra-thin portables will generate new growth points and limit the share captured by netbooks, the research house said, without identifying the types of ultra-thin portables.
Late last month, Apple Inc launched the iPad tablet computer — a thin and light, 9.7-inch touchscreen device good for Web browsing, video, games and electronic books, at US$499 each. Apple is positioning the iPad as a “third category” device — somewhere between laptops and smartphones — but demand is still uncertain.
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