smartbook Archive

The folks at slashgear got ahold of the new HP Compaq Airlife 100 smartbook today and had a chance for a quick hands on. Here are the hardware specs:

• Qualcomm 1GHz Snapdragon processor
• 10.1″ resistive touchscreen display
• 16GB SSD drive
• 1GB RAM
• 3G
• 802.11 b/g wifi
• webcam, SD slot, etc

The Airlife 100 is the first smartbook from HP featuring the Snapdragon processor which has mainly been used in cellphones. It has a large 92% full size keyboard and the Google Android OS. Even with a relatively “slow” 1GHz processor, the Compaq is pretty zippy with its streamlined OS.

Apparently one strong point of the Airlife is its “resume” time, basically just open the display and it’s ready to use. The battery life is also impressive, listed at 12 hours but HP said you can expect more with normal use.

No word on price yet but it will be subsidized through Telefonica for now, so look for a cheaper price with a contract. Here is a quick hands on video:

Engadget found a very cool smartbook by HP at CES, and it’s running on Android 1.6. If you didn’t know netbooks typically use an Intel Atom processor while smartbooks use a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (1GHz and usually reserved for cellphones) and are usually slower, lighter and cheaper but not always.

This smartbook has a 10 inch touchscreen and even though it’s just a concept it seems to run very smooth and looks pretty good.

via engadget

Nicole over at Netbook News got her hands on the new Inventec Smartbook for a quick hands on review. It is of course not released yet and will be re-branded by manufactureres in it’s final form, but it should be pretty close to the model here.

Smartbooks have not been as popular as netbooks so far because they lack the functionality of netbooks. They are typically slower, have less graphics capabilities, and don’t have full featured operating systems like Windows 7 or equivalent. Some of the new ones, though, are blurring these lines. The Inventec shown in the video here features an Nvidia Tegra T600 chipset so it has fast boot times as well as full HD video capabilities.

Another interesting feature is that it has no on-board storage, reminiscent of the Google Chrome OS netbooks. It only runs on Windows CE at the moment but we can assume that as it’s rebranded by other manufacturers it might end up running on Android or maybe even Google’s Chrome OS? We’ll have to wait and see.

via NetbookNews

Remember how we said new Netbooks were coming for CES? We might as well expand that statement to include smartbooks. The new terminology,which describes laptop-style devices running sub-Atom processors (Snapdragon from Qualcomm being one of them), is rapidly gaining in fashion lately, especially in relation to cell phone carriers. Packaging these types of extremely small and cheap smart devices in with cellular data plans seems like a match made in gadget heaven.

We’ve seen prototype smartbooks from Nvidia featuring the Tegra processor (the same that’s in the Zune HD), but the Lenovo smartbook unveiled ever-so-briefly at a Qualcomm event Thursday is new and intriguing, and is the first smartbook to feature Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. Reports say that it runs a variation of a Linux OS (Windows 7 stops at Netbooks) and has an HD-supporting screen, although it’s not clear whether HD video can actually be played.

On Tegra smartbooks, we know that the answer to that question is yes, since the Zune HD can easily handle HD video. Our other question is: if this essentially has a smartphone processor in a laptop’s body, would you simply prefer a smartphone instead? The picture’s fuzzy, but which would you want most, a smartbook, Netbook, or smartphone?

More details should be forthcoming at CES, which is only two months away.

via cnet