The growing category of netbooks, many of which are built around Intel’s Atom processor, is getting a competitor. Qualcomm announced Sunday it is expanding its Snapdragon platform with a new chipset for “smartbooks” and new smartphones.
Smartbooks are smaller than netbooks and will be sold through telecommunications companies.
Improved Battery, GPS
The San Diego, Calif.-based company said its chipset, which will use the new 45-nanometer process technology, will provide devices with faster processing, improved battery life, and other enhancements, such as GPS.
The Snapdragon QSD8650A chipset, expected to be available for sampling by the end of the year, includes a 1.3-GHz processor, which Qualcomm said gives 30 percent higher performance and 30 percent lower dynamic power. The chipset also enables multi-mode UMTS and CDMA 3G, integrated GPS, high-definition video recording and playback, Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi support, high-resolution WXGA displays, and various mobile technologies.
The Snapdragon family also includes the original one-GHz QSD8x50 chipset and the 45nm QSD8672 with dual CPUs of up to 1.5 GHz.
In its announcement, Qualcom said more than 15 manufacturers are developing more than 30 Snapdragon-based products. The first, the Toshiba TG01 Smartphone, was introduced in February. At the Computex trade show currently taking place in Taiwan, Snapdragon-based smartbooks are being shown by ASUS, HTC, Toshiba, and others.
Netbooks are booming as a category, but the jury is still out on smartbooks. Some industry observers have noted that the advantages offered by smartbooks over netbooks, including GPS and long battery life, may be outweighed by several disadvantages.
Where Fits In?
The biggest disadvantage for Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, is that smartbooks don’t offer something better or different.
A smartbook, he said, is “bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a netbook,” and its advantages include an ability to boot up almost immediately, a “tremendous” battery life, “hefty computing power,”…