Erica Ogg’s commentary on Crave/C|Net Aug. 20 urging the death of the netbook moniker would seem to align itself with our vision of the world quite well. When Qualcomm first proposed the “smartbook” tag for the always-on, low-power system earlier this summer, many market analysts cringed. Since that time, however, several journalists have jumped on board, suggesting a platform bearing more resemblance to a smartphone than a notebook might have more validity than the terminology of the netbook. Hours after Ogg’s post, Mike Elgan at Wi-Fi Planet stated matter-of-factly that “there’s no such thing as a netbook,” and that a smartbook constitutes the only distinct device that matters.

But the Crave and Wi-Fi Planet suggestions still bother me. If a netbook seems indistinguishable from a notebook in Ogg’s eyes, do we squint and find a smartbook to be equivalent to a PDA? I’m not sure I buy either squishing of market distinctions. There is an equally valid case for retaining product distinctions in all cases:

Notebooks and subnotebooks have displays that may run to 12” or greater in size. For those less concerned about weight than about high-res graphics, notebooks may even try to rival the Unix/Linux workstations of yore. And some technical users may opt for a platform where size of keyboard and display goes up, not down.

This kind of trend will make the netbook its own category, albeit a fuzzy one without a clear distinction of maximum display size. The key variable may be whether such a platform fits easily into a purse or shoulder bag. The netbook may in many cases dispense with a hard drive, using an SD card for main memory. But the lack of a hard drive will not be an absolute criterion for such a device.

As we have reiterated several times, a smartbook will emphasize battery life and always-on characteristics, which may in many cases lead to applications being stored on a remote server, rather than on the local smartbook. While a smartbook does not have to be a cloud-computing client, its power characteristics would almost require an SD card as an optional storage option, or perhaps a very power-efficient hard drive. Its distinction from a PDA is that the traditional PDA is seen more as an organizer and quick-application delivery platform. If anything, the PDA may meld more with Blackberry functionality than with smartbook.

Finally, the smartphone remains distinct due to its continued voice-centric capabilities. As application richness expands, some people may opt for a smartphone over either a smartbook or netbook, but that does not mean the categories fully overlap.

Erica’s commentary begs for a simpler world, where blurring of product specs means that we call everything more portable than a desktop system a “notebook” by convention. Doesn’t work for me at all. More diversity in nomenclature may just be the price of the rich set of features being promoted in all such categories.

Credits: the smartbook blog

Recent events raise interesting questions about the way that most consumers are likely to obtain their smartbooks. For starters, AT&T Mobility announced in late July that it plans to offer the Acer Aspire One, Dell Inspirion Mini 10, and Lenovo S10 netbooks at a subsidized price of $199 to customers willing to sign a two-year contract for data services.

Since then, Verizon has begun offering buyers of its Blackberry Tour smartphone a choice of any second device of equal or lesser value from its product line – including HP’s Mini 1151 NR netbook – for free, after signing a two-year contract, that is.

Subsidized model

The AT&T and Verizon offerings raise the related question of whether underwriting from wireless operators will become the preferred business model in the industry. Many consumers may assume this is a necessity for jump-starting a market, and that “leasing” their gadgets from the wireless operators is simply the normal way the industry operates.

They may be right in a broad sense, but is the subsidization-for-service-contract model the only one that makes sense?

iPhone users who choose to experiment with device hacks, higher-end digitizers, and other souped-up alternatives already are discovering that outright ownership may be safer than an AT&T contract with several “gotcha” clauses. Users coming from the traditional PC industry may have even higher expectations of being able to expand their hardware as they see fit. Although iPhone hackers and innovators represent only a small percentage of the market, they are going to be intensely interested to learn what hidden rules of the road an AT&T or Verizon will apply to underwritten smartbooks.

The service-contract model also fits neatly into Google’s view of small-device activity moving invariably towards cloud-computing models where the heavy lifting is performed remotely, at the data center. But is that the right model for all users?

And if carriers and software suppliers succeed in moving us to a user model of minimal local processing, will they lock users into hardware platforms with no storage other than flash memory? That may end up being the preferred architecture anyway, as solid-state memory density improves and disk drives prove too power-hungry to retain in a smartbook architecture.

Should operators decide?

The concern I have is that most of these decisions are likely to be made by the wireless operators, working in concert with software suppliers. The manufacturers invariably will give the carriers whatever they want, and the demands of the end user will fall by the wayside.

I am assuming, of course, that somewhat informed users of Android or Windows CE-based devices will want some say in how smartbook architectures evolve.

In truth, the more common model from the smartphone world is that wireless operators typically launch products in conjunction with the manufacturers and feed them to compliant handset users willing to swallow almost any feature set without a lot of complaints. Remember, most of the market consists of users who take whatever the carriers give them.

AT&T Mobility can claim to offer variety by underwriting Acer, Dell, and Lenovo at the same time. But will smartbooks of the future be defined exclusively by the wireless operators?

Let’s hope there’s a mix of ownership options out there, because not all users are likely to feel comfortable with a single distribution model dominating this emerging market.

Credits: the smartbook blog

There’s been a lot of bluster from some big players about the new category of mobile devices called smartbooks. Smartbooks are small netbook/notebook/clamshell form factor devices based around ARM processors rather than x86 processors found in your typical netbook/notebook. We went to Shenzen where we were actually able to buy the new Lanyu LY-EB01 eBook. Read on for our review.

Caveats

We didn’t go down to BestBuy and purchase our Lanyu eBook. We called the company and ordered it and had to pick it up in Shenzen, China. That’s not exactly your typical consumer sales channel but that is how Lanyu is selling the device at the moment and it is available to buy.

Usually when you’re reading a netbook review for example, the product has been placed with the reviewers by a PR or marketing flack representing the company whose product is being reviewed. They might also provide some literature about the position of the product and its expected performance. We didn’t tell Lanyu why we wanted to buy the device, we just bought it.

About Smartbooks

People are excited about smartbooks because they should bring to market some long sought after features that netbooks and notebooks haven’t quite been able to. Features like really long battery life, instant on, small size and weight, all at a comparatively cheap price. We paid just 666 RMB (US$98) for volumes of 1 for the Lanyu eBook!

Smartbooks are typically going to be based on ARM architecture SOCs. That will likely mean a Windows CE or Google Android operating system and attendant applications. ARM processors tend to run in a variety of SKUs in terms of performance (from about 266MHz ~ 1GHz) and are made by a large number of different manufacturers. ARM and x86 don’t exactly compare directly MHz for MHz so bear that in mind as well.

Lanyu LY-EB01 eBook

First Impressions

Usability Score =7 out 10

The packaging for the Lanyu LY-EB01 eBook is a little confusing but a bit more consumer oriented than I expected. It looks fairly professional but the front cover doesn’t show a product name it just says “7” Notebook” and “Windows CE”. The backside has a few features listed including: “Battery standby time 1 day, QQ, MSN, Skype, Weight 0.6kg, MP3, MP4, Music play, Movie play, Photo, Game, Wifi, Internet, office, PDF, andE-mail”. In the box you get the device itself, a power cord and a users manual. The users manual is in English and has descriptions of the different bits of hardware on the device (card reader explanation etc) and some brief descriptions of how to set up your wi-fi and play media on the device. We had no trouble whatsoever setting up the wi-fi quickly and easily.

Pulling the eBook out of the box I have to say I was impressed by the build quality of the device. At that price I was expecting something a lot flimsier but it actually feels quite sturdy and the Sony “PSP-like” piano black finish on the cover of the device is quite attractive. Like the PSP its also a fingerprint magnet.

A walk around the device shows a card reader and ear/microphone ports on one side. Along the front a series of indicator lights for power, battery, number lock, caps lock and scroll lock. The opposite side has 2 USB ports and the back of the device has another USB port, an ethernet port and the power connection.

The front screen of the device is surrounded by large, and quite loud (but tinny sounding) speakers. It also has what “looks” like a webcam but seems to actually be the world’s tiniest vanity mirror .

The mouse pad is interesting. Its quite responsive for zipping around the screen. The left and right click panels beside it are not quite as impressive. They work ok, but are could have been a little wider to make for easier clicking. The mousepad itself can be clicked for a left click effect.

The battery is “non-removable” as in, its screwed into place. I suspect it won’t be long before we do a tear down of the device so when that happens we’ll try and get more information about that side of things. The charger and cord are incredibly small and that is certainly one of the great benefits of the smartbook category.

Getting into the Smartbook

Booting up the device takes 28 seconds while everything initializes. That’s not instant on but certainly a lot faster than my notebook. It also only takes 3 seconds to shut off. Considering it takes 2.5 years for my notebook to shut down that’s quite good as well.

The 800X600 screen of the eBook itself while small actually is quite bright and doesn’t “feel” too small for moving around through the different applications.

Opening a web page though does expose the limitations of the “screen and if you’re buying a smartbook as a replacement for a netbook I think you’ll be a little let down by the Internet experience the device provides. You can’t change the screen resolution and a lot of sites won’t fit within the boundries of the screen meaning you have to use the scroll bars (bottom and right of the screen) to view around a site. A quick visit to youtube.com is the best way to really see the limitations of the IE browser running on Win CE 5.0. In fact Youtube gives you a warning that they will be phasing out support for your browser when you arrive.

On the device packaging Skype and QQ are listed. Neither of those software programs seemed to be on the device out of the box, but after searching around the 1.5GB flash drive that includes a “software package” folder we did manage to find Skype, although it wouldn’t start up and also Opera, which wouldn’t fire up either.

The keyboard is…. small, but that’s a challenge all 7” smartbooks will face. It’s the same challenge that early 8.9” netbooks also had. Will smartbooks evolve into larger devices the same way netbooks have? That will probably depend on the performance of the hardware and also the evolution of Android/Chrome.

Under the hood

The Lanyu eBook was reported to have a 266MHz ARM processor from Anyka when it first appeared on the web. When we checked the properties of the My Computer on the device it shows a AKARM,ARM 920-AKCHIP. The only information we found on the internet about this chip was this page which says it comes from AMD (rather than Anyka as we reported earlier) and that it’s a 533MHz sku. I don’t think that site is particularly reliable so it safe to say we’re not really 100% sure about the processor under the hood. Personally my money is on Anyka.

I would say however that the applications that are included seem quite responsive if not quite “snappy” in terms of general use. We’re going to take a closer look at the devices media playback properties and office performance in tomorrow’s video coverage of the device.

We do know you get a gig and a half of memory with the device. Which will make the card reader slot invaluable. That sounds small, and it is, but there are a couple of benefits to that. No hard drive really drops the weight of the device down. At .6kg this device is incredibly portable and light weight.

There are 3 USB ports as we mentioned and pulling the screenshots off the device to a USB memory stick proved that 1 of those USB ports was completely non-functional. I tried several different brands of memory and none worked.

Credits: Shanzai.com