Freescale embraces SmartBooks

Darius Chang | Jun 08, 2009

Smartbook prototype featuring a vertical display.
(Image credit: Freescale)

As if the line between Netbooks and notebooks are not blurred enough, at the Computex Taipei 2009 tradeshow, we caught a glimpse of another category of portables: Smartbooks. Essentially a Netbook running on a mobile phone chipset and operating system, a Smartbook gives up the ability to run x86 operating systems like Windows XP, but gets instant-on capability and all-day battery life with constant connectivity to wireless broadband networks.

Freescale semiconductor, a company which manufactures ARM-based chipsets for mobile handsets, is so confident about the future of Smartbooks that it has worked with a top North American industrial design program to create a series of concept Smartbook designs.

From the outlandish to the practical, most of these designs will probably never make it off the drawing board but it is interesting to see the kinds of form factors possible with the petite ARM-based chipsets. Click on the thumbnails below for larger images.