We were pondering a week ago whether Coby’s $85 retail price would start a new tidal wave at the low end of the nascent smartbook market.  It didn’t take long to come to an affirmative answer.  Android Community and Ubergizmo carried briefs March 9 on an Android-based smartbook from Firstview HK Electronic Ltd. with a bill of materials at $65, though no retail prices were floated.

This is one of the Asian vendors choosing to use the Via Technologies Inc. ARM 9 clocked at 533 MHz – not a Snapdragon or …

As I watched the latest raft of Apple iPad advertisements gracing the Academy Awards March 7, something troubled me regarding Apple’s recent lawsuits against HTC (and, indirectly, Google’s Nexus One).  So am I just an inherent Apple basher?  Isn’t Apple protecting its intellectual property in the same aggressive way Nokia is?  Would we expect anything less?

But as I viewed the disembodied hands expanding icons to applications on the eagerly-anticipated iPad, it suddenly occurred to me why there is something troubling going on.  Nokia is following the well-trodden paths of the …

With all this talk of netbooks, smartbooks and tablets, it’s easy to forget Intel’s somewhat hybrid Classmate series. So Intel has given us a timely reminder.

As the name suggests, the Classmate series targets the education sector and is essentially a rugged netbook with simplified OS. Specs-wise, they closely follow the netbook sector, so the refreshed line will ship with a new Pine Trail-based Atom processor. More interesting is the Classmate breaks from the mold with a tablet form factor and swivelling touchscreen 10.1-in. 1024 x 600 pixel display, backed up with connectivity options that …

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs made news March 4 by telling attendees at an investor conference that he foresees a smaller pool of wireless chip providers. The number of players, he said, will shrink due to consolidation or companies simply disappearing.

He stopped short, however, of saying that Qualcomm would be a consolidator. Instead, he said Qualcomm would essentially pressure competitors out of the market with aggressive pricing and technological innovation.

Qualcomm certainly has the technical prowess and the leading market position to accomplish that, but it also has the cash to buy competitors, and should consider …

The rampant blog traffic March 4 regarding Coby’s offer to take smartbook prices below $100 could have been anticipated.  Semiconductor suppliers can talk about “bills of materials” until they’re blue in the face, but when someone offers a smartbook at a retail price of $85, the message gets through to the end consumer.

Most reader comments at Engadget (from whence this picture comes) and ZDnet center on whether ruggedness and reliability matter at a price that is at par with a nice dinner for two.  Certainly, we can’t fault the NBPC722 …

Could the trade off between power and battery life be about to be quashed once and for all?

After weeks, even months, of speculation Nvidia has officially unveiled its second generation Ion platform to the world and called it ‘Ion’. Yes, despite all talk of ‘Ion2′, Nvidia has opted for the Intel/Apple approach of retaining the same key branding, which makes a lot of sense and keeps things simple.

So what does Ion (2) bring? Funnily enough, Nvidia didn’t break down the complete specs, but what was revealed is crucial: for a start, netbooks equipped with …

The European Union this week is imposing rules on mobile carriers that limit what they can charge customers for Internet access. The “roaming rules” let customers pre-set how much they want to spend monthly on roaming charges, which kick in when traveling outside one’s home country.

If customers do not pre-set their spending limit by July, operators will set a default limit of 50 euros, or about $65. Customers will be notified when they reach eighty percent of the limit.

The point of this, according to EU officials, is to protect customers against data roaming bill …

Note: A reticle is a fancy name for the photomask used in the advanced form of photolithography found in deep-submicron chip plants.  There is no conceivable reason you would need to know this, but “rockin’ the reticle” leads to better headlines than most alternatives.

In these lean times of $10 billion semiconductor manufacturing plants and bankrupt chip designers, you have to go to great lengths to find good friends.  And now that the smallest feature size on a processor chip has plummeted well below 100 nanometers (or a tenth of a micron, hence the term “…

It may have as much of a libel focus as a product one these days, but German PC builder Smartbook AG does have one notable claim to fame: it has never actually made a smartbook.

That doesn’t look set to change any time soon either, as the maker of such ‘gems’ as the Zenid GC Crystal netbook has reached new heights of irony with the announcement of the ‘Smartbook Logo’… a CULV laptop.

Spotted by Liliputing, the laptop features an Intel CULV (Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage) processor, 11.6-in 1366 x 768 …