Can smartbooks breake the lease?

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