The smartbook battle for hearts and minds isn’t just a straight format-vs.-format free-for-all; it actually signifies a number of major rivalries internally as well. Nvidia’s Tegra 2 has emerged well, with wins inside the Mobinnova Beam and Pegatron Neo , but Qualcomm has caught a bigger fish in Lenovo, and has now just reeled in a whale…
Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s largest PC maker, confirmed it has chosen Snapdragon to power its next ultraportable laptop – delivering a blow not only to Nvidia, but also Intel.
“We are not making any [formal retail] announcements today, but you know how interested and focused and frankly committed we are to this space,” HP’s PC executive vice president Todd Bradley told us at CES last week.
While the company wasn’t keen on press photography, I managed to grab screenshots of the as yet unnamed model and did learn that on top of its Qualcomm heart, it will run on Android, integrate 3G and Wi-Fi, and promise to last for a minimum of 12 hours using a slimline battery. These are all fairly familiar smartbook qualities, but one key area of difference is HP has chosen to fit a multi-touch capacitive display – a particularly handy feature given Android’s touchscreen smartphone origins.
How the choice of such an advanced panel will affect price remains to be seen, but either way it certainly is big news for Qualcomm, which can also count Acer, Dell, Google, HTC, LG and Toshiba amongst its allies in the smartphone market.
Yes, it isn’t just a case of ‘will smartbooks succeed’, but also ‘whose smartbooks will succeed’…
Gordon
