I’ve recently talked about the potential tablet threat to smartbooks, but it seems the companies behind these two formats may not actually mind too much who wins out.
In recent weeks, a number of the tablets unveiled at CES have been photographed in the wild and stripped down, revealing an interesting fact: the majority contain either Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform or Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chipset. For example, the Dell Mini 5 tablet, shown off by Microsoft, uses Snapdragon, while MSI’s unnamed tablet and the Asus Eee Pad use Tegra.
Compare this to the smartbook market, where Snapdragon is found inside what was arguably CES’ highlight: the Lenovo Skylight and Hewlett Packard’s smartbook concept, while Tegra powers the Mobinnova Beam and Pegatron Neo.
Consequently, while the smartbook/tablet battle may prove fierce, it largely looks like a battle based purely on form factors, since whichever wins (if indeed there is an outright winner), both Qualcomm and Nvidia look to be sitting very pretty indeed.
Gordon
