Digital Home Thoughts: Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon Based Smartbook

"We asked one of the product managers from Qualcomm to give us a demo of the system. It is based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform which consists of a 1GHz CPU. Because of the platforms “extremely low power consumption”, no cooling is required which allows for ultra thin netbooks. It is capable of playing back 720p video with the current gen chips, and in the future 1080p will be supported with the faster clock processors."

Goodbye netbook, hello smartbook! At least, if Qualcomm is successful at all, smartbooks are the next step beyond netbooks. Running on an ARM based Snapdragon CPU at 1.3Ghz with lots of features normally found in high end smartphones, the biggest benefit that a smartbook provides is battery life that could last for days and always on access. Reports say that it will have a $300-$500 price tag, which I think is too much. That puts it in the same price range as many netbooks, many of which offer many more features. I believe the biggest problem will be consumer perception. Following the netbook and notebook physical layout means most people will want to do computer type activities with it. Is an all day battery and always on abilities enough to sway your purchasing choice? Or do you expect more of a PC like experience if you've got a laptop like device in front of you? If they can position the device with the same expectations as a phone, it might have a better chance of sticking. Otherwise, you'll find people returning these in favour of Windows based netbooks. Hey, it has happened before.