What is a Smartbook?

The term smartbook has reportedly been coined by Qualcomm during their release of a smartphone combined netbook device.  Other terms surrounding this device can be identified as netbook, pursebook, and a variety of others which did not gain public attention. The reasoning stems from the portability of the device, alongside the technology which it is integrated with as it shares similar components to the smartphone and the netbook technologies.

These technologies offer a host of benefits; one in particular is the screen size which is larger than the smartphone designs and smaller than the netbook design concepts.  Another example comes from internal components as a netbook offers standard computer usage in terms of video, audio, USB support, Bluetooth support, and a variety of WIFI capabilities.  The smartphone on the other hand offers capabilities for wireless wide area networks (WWAN), and smartphone related operating systems (such as Google Android, Linux, etc), along with standard phone features.

Most of these devices are being designed for integration into the mobile carrier services, which are to become similar to the current smartphone data plans where a wireless data plan will be sold to the consumer.  Much of the software which will be used shall be designed specifically for the device, however, with open source operating systems that are poised to run on the device, such as Linux, there are rumors that modifications will be made for application compatibility.

Thus, the smartbook seeks to incorporate both technologies in order to simplify and integrate the computer/phone experience into one single device.  For more information on the smartbook, you can visit Wikipedia