What´s in a smartbook name?

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