Listen to some bloggers and Consumer Electronics Show attendees, and they’ll insist the sparse showing for smartbooks at the show is an indicator that an ARM-based alternative to netbooks is a rapidly-disappearing pipe dream. We stressed several times before CES that time frames in recessions are extended significantly, and no sober analysis of smartbooks’ stance should be made before the end of 2010, at the earliest.
Listen to Lenovo COO Rory Read, however, and he’ll tell you how smartbooks are ready to sweep netbooks out the door. There are certainly advantages that both keyboard-based and tablet-based smartbooks can bring to this party, but CES underscored some obvious limitations that must be addressed before smartbooks can claim the best brooms for spring cleaning.
On the carrier front, we talked last week about how wireless operators need to fill in gaps in their 4G coverage before they’re really ready to offer broadband services. In addition, the user revolt accompanying the aftermath of Google’s Nexus One launch has hit earthquake proportions, reminding us that nothing sours a market more than inadequate customer support from either the operator or the OEM. Carriers and manufacturers alike should use the post-CES downtime to get their acts together once and for all, and not announce a service or a bundled smartbook until it’s ready for hardware delivery and customer use.
On the applications front, pundits expressed disappointment that there was not a Qualcomm announcement of an apps store. Is this a Qualcomm responsibility or a joint ARM-licensee responsibility, and if the former, will there be Balkanization among the different flavors of ARM in the smartbook space? Intel launched its own netbook apps store on Jan. 8, and despite the existence of other Wintel-compatible offerings in netbook realms like processors from Via, Intel can in general rely on the “single-arrowhead” strategy of application delivery. Who will take the responsibility of unified ARM smartbook apps, and how will they be aggregated and delivered? Both Intel and ARM licensees have to examine the gargantuan base Apple has assembled for iPhone – the applications will be different from the smartphone realm to be sure, but the ramp-up of iPhone applications is something everyone in both smartbook and netbook worlds needs to study.
Finally, we have the status and number of committed OEMs to address. Hewlett-Packard was a significant win for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, but HP is still months away from an offering. Marvell displayed a great SMART Armada prototype, and Freescale Semiconductor showed off an impressive i.MX tablet, but neither design has OEMs behind it. This blog regularly reports on rumored platforms from Asia that barely are noted in the U.S. – Notion Ink, Qigi, UMID – but will they make a difference in the overall global perception of an ARM-based smartbook market?
In all honesty, CES provided the world just about the level of smartbook validation I expected, with solid offerings from Lenovo, Mobinnova, and Pegatron covered here by Gordon Kelly. But it also underscored the need for new brooms if the market sector is going to meet Rory Read’s anticipation for sweeping out netbook ashes.
Loring
