If you’re in a small room with an operating smartbook, listen carefully. The overwhelming sound you should hear is silence. That’s because most smartbooks, thanks to their extremely low power consumption, should be able to avoid using any kind of cooling fans in normal operation. This allows smartbooks to be significantly smaller and lighter than previous sub-notebook computing devices. In most cases, they should weigh less than 2 pounds (sometimes much less), and be less than 20 mm thick at their thinnest dimension.

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all form-factor for smartbooks. Some might look like sub-notebooks, with full keyboards and displays, while others might be touch-screen tablet devices. Eventually, we expect some products to look unlike any netbook, smartphone or mobile Internet device yet introduced to the market.

Besides their compact size and low-power use, we also know that smartbooks will feature always-on connectivity, all-day battery life, easy-to-use and customizable interfaces, as well as integrated GPS location functionality. Yet there are some things we don’t yet know about smartbooks, including how they will be received in the market, and how manufacturers, software developers and service providers will choose to take advantage of these new devices’ capabilities.

Will a legacy Word or Acrobat software application perform all its computing locally, for instance, and will documents created on a smartbook be stored locally? And will that storage take place on a disk drive, or solid-state chips? Here’s where some of the biggest unknowns reside in the still-emerging smartbook definition. That uncertainty also applies to new software applications developed specifically for the smartbook.

Cloud computing

In the world of big data-center computing, the trendiest slogan of the past five years has been “cloud computing.” In this still-emerging business model, when a user opens an application, instead of that application residing on the user’s computer, it might be accessed via the Internet from a cluster of remote computers in a wide-area network “cloud.” The application might borrow all of its processing power from the cloud. And it might even store its finished data in the cloud.

Some supporters of smartbooks make an intuitive assumption that the device in the user’s hands can be kept even more simple, lightweight and power-efficient by relying on cloud computing. In fact, they have a hard time contemplating a smartbook that is not an integral part of the cloud.

We’re not making that assumption. It may turn out that users prefer to keep control of their data, and that the cost and power-drain of onboard storage drops fast enough to keep many documents stored locally on the smartbook. Or it may be that 95 percent of users’ data eventually live in the cloud. At this point we’re not ready to make the call either way. But we also do not assume that one model or the other necessarily ends up on top. Users – not manufacturers, developers nor service providers – will ultimately define how a smartbook behaves.

Connectivity

One area where chip vendors can show their edge is in the connectivity of a smartbook. Even if a lot of storage and application processing takes place locally, the smartbook will be defined by its communication options, even more so than a notebook computer. Data services from a 3G/4G wireless supplier, Wi-Fi local-area service, Bluetooth personal links, USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports, GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation, even Near-Field Communications for micropayments on a credit card, will all be likely links for a baseline smartbook.

Will every smartbook have every communication option? No, but some specialized smartbooks may eventually sport even more links, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), WiMax, Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet. This will make the smartbook much richer in its links than the PCs and PDAs of the past, regardless of the smartbook’s form factor.

In five years’ time, we expect there to be anywhere between three and 10 common form factors for smartbooks. But in its early years, this market could spawn an unbelievable variety of new form factors and device types. The debate over what constitutes a true smartbook will be one of the key subjects of this blog.

For more on the characteristics of smartbooks, please visit www.meetsmartbook.com.