Qualcomm Shows Off World's First 'Smartbook'

During a briefing before financial analysts Thursday, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs briefly demonstrated the world's first smartbook, which is based on the company's Snapdragon microprocessor. Though the new device from Lenovo will not formally debut until the Winter CES show in January, Jacobs said it's already slated to run on AT&T's wireless network in the United States.

Designed to fit a mobile market niche that falls midway between a smartphone and a netbook, the device integrates many of the features found on today's smartphones but within a slightly larger form factor that sports a larger display and a full keyboard. Jacobs also noted that Lenovo's smartbook represents the first full implementation of Adobe Flash 10 on an ARM-based processor that can even run video in high definition.

"One of the things that some of our competitors have been saying is that you can't get the full Internet experience on ARM because we didn't have Flash, and that's wrong," Jacobs told investors.

Size Matters

During the briefing, Jacobs placed his own handset next to the new smartbook to demonstrate that Lenovo's device is about the same thickness as a Palm Pre. Lenovo's smartbook also sports a surprisingly big battery, which is mostly for supporting the display, Jacob noted.

Turn on the device and the screen instantly presents the user interface, which consists of six active widgets. "These are always on and always synchronizing your e-mail, Facebook status, the web, and all sorts of other stuff," Jacobs observed.

Jacobs said he believes Lenovo's smartbook will prove a compelling product. "It's going to change the experience of using the Internet on a device that has a full keyboard and a full-sized screen," he said.

However, Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi believes the industry is "getting a little carried away" with coining new names for forthcoming products that are similar to existing device types. "Smartbooks, I think, are larger smartphones in reality, or MIDs (mobile Internet devices)," Milanesi said.

The Gartner analyst is also unsure whether the smartbook form factor is small enough to really go mass market in the way smartphones have. "To be successful, these products need to be pocketable so that users have them with them at all times," Milanesi said.

A More Profound Impact

Still, it's easy to see why Qualcomm is heavily promoting its ARM-based Snapdragon chips for deployment in mobile devices for data applications. By 2014, Jacobs told investors, the amount of mobile data traffic worldwide in a single month is expected to exceed the total amount of data traffic in all of 2008.

Jacobs observed that smartphone shipments are expected to surpass all computer shipments in 2011, according to data from research firm Informa. This helps to explain why wireless operators the world over are in the midst of changing their subsidy allocations, Jacobs observed. They are moving "toward the data-rich devices because that's where they are seeing the growth," he said.

A recent analysis of the European market shows that wireless operators there have been dramatically increasing their subsidies for data-rich devices. For example, the subsidy pie allocation for HSDPA phones has grown from 14 percent in 2007 to 74 percent in the year to date, Jacobs said.

Moreover, smartbooks don't necessarily need to grab a huge market share at the outset to attract wireless carrier interest because a relatively small number of data subscribers can make a big difference. Using data from AT&T, Jacobs showed analysts that the top three percent of the carrier's smartphone customers currently account for 40 percent of all smartphone data use and consume 13 times the amount of data as the average smartphone customer.