Lenovo has taken the wraps off Skylight — the PC maker’s first machine based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset for building always-on mobile computing devices called smartbooks. Designed to run for up to 10 hours off a single battery charge, the sleek and slim Skylight is designed to operate via AT&T’s 3G network and 20,000 Wi-Fi hot spots nationwide.
The burning question, however, is whether Skyline and other smartbooks will further exacerbate the negative impact that heavy smartphone data traffic is having on 3G networks worldwide. “The uptake in netbooks might give us some idea how popular smartbooks might eventually become,” noted Lisa Pierce, an independent wireless analyst at the Strategic Networks Group.
As the nation’s wireless carriers have already learned about smartphones, an important criterion is how well the handset’s protocols are designed for use on 3G networks, Pierce observed. For smartbooks, “we obviously won’t know the answer until customers start using them,” Pierce said.
One Burning Question
Available in glossy lotus blue and earth red and tipping the scales at less than two pounds, Skylight sports a clamshell design that opens to reveal a 10-inch high-definition color screen and a full-size keyboard. Under the hood, Skylight integrates a one-GHz ARM-based Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, Wi-Fi and 3G radios, and 20GB of internal memory.
“Skylight combines the long battery life and connectivity of a smartphone with the full web-browsing and multimedia experience of a netbook to create one of the first devices in this developing smartbook category,” said Peter Gaucher, Lenovo’s executive director of mobile Internet product management.
On the software side, the always-on device is equipped with more than 18 preloaded web gadgets that make it a snap for users to download music and movies, read e-mail, or access social-networking sites. The device also can store up to 2GB of personal…