ZDNet Blogs: Zinio Developping Software for Snapdragon Smartbooks
The tech industry is always looking for the next big thing: Bing is gaining on Google, the Palm Pre will dethrone the iPhone, and so on. One of the latest “next big things” is the duo of ARM and Android which, if you buy the hype, will wrest the PC industry from Wintel’s grip.
Because it has the DNA of smartphones–most of which are based on ARM designs–this new type of netbook is supposed to offer many advantages over Intel Atom-based models including a fast boot time, always-on wireless broadband and all-day battery life. Qualcomm–one of several wireless companies developing chipsets with ARM cores for this new market–has coined the term smartbook to distinguish these devices from netbooks.
Smartbooks were the talk of the recent Computex show in Taiwan. Qualcomm said 15 companies–including Asus, Compal, Foxconn, HTC, Inventec, Toshiba and Wistron–are working on 30 different devices using its ARM-based Snapdragon platform. The first Snapdragon product, the Toshiba TG01, is actually a smartphone for Japan, but the company showed several smartbooks as well including an Eee PC running Google’s Android. In its meeting room, ARM was demonstrating smartbook and nettop prototypes using application processors from Qualcomm and Freescale with various Linux distributions. Acer announced it would be the first to ship an Android netbook, albeit using Intel’s Atom, sometime next quarter. Competitors such as HP and Dell have previously said they are experimenting with Android as well (now HP may even be working on Snapdragon-based Minis).
At Computex, Qualcomm announced that several developers, including RealNetworks, Zinio and Xandros, are working on version of their software for Snapdragon.
