Changing sides

ASUS boss Jerry Shen has confirmed that his company is going to launch a smartbook device in Q1 2010, reports shanzai.com, citing its source as the Chinese language China Times. Shen was apparently speaking at an investor conference in Taipei and signalled a change in approach from his previous reticence in endorsing the smartbook concept.

Just to recap, smartbook is a term coined by Qualcomm and adopted by the rest of the ARM ecosystem, to define a mini-notebook that runs on a low-power processor using the ARM instruction set - as opposed to x86, which is used by Intel and AMD CPUs.

While smartbooks are expected to offer advantages in terms of price and battery life, their most significant single drawback is that Microsoft has yet to write a full version of Windows that runs on the ARM instruction set. For this reason, Google's Android and Chrome operating systems are expected to feature prominently, but smartbooks are defined by the processor rather than the OS.

If ASUS does embrace the smartbook opportunity it will be especially significant, as it was the OEM to pioneer the mass marketing of Intel's Atom processor, when it played a major role in establishing the (Intel named) netbook category with its Eee PC range. It's no secret that Intel and the ARM ecosystem are in direct competition with each other, so this move is unlikely to endear ASUS to Intel.

The report doesn't say who will be making the processor inside this future smartbook but ASUS did have a transient presence in Qualcomm's Snapdragon showcase at this year's Computex. The report prices it at around 6000 Taiwan dollars, which equates to around £112 and $184 in today's money.

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