Asus Chairman Jonney Shih talks about the Asus ARM based Smartbooks in the works

Pegatron lands large-volume smartbook orders

From Digitimes -

Pegatron Technology has received a large volume of orders for smartbooks from several clients, which are likely to launch in cooperation with mobile telcos in Q1 2010. Smartbooks, which are positioned between smartphones and netbooks, offer longer usage time, short boot-up time, friendlier user interfaces, and lower prices than the latter.

Price point will likely be US$200 price point when the first wave of smartbooks arrive in Q1 2010. Google Chrome OS-based smartbooks are expected to be available on a large scale in Q2 2010.

ECS and MSI conservative about ARM-based smartbooks

From Digitimes -

ECS and MSI will not follow Acer, Foxconn, Pegatron, Compal and Inventec which are all expected to launch ARM-based smartbooks later this year. ECS had previously gotten smartbook orders from China-based vendors. However the orders were subsequently cancelled. So now it has postponed entering the smartbook market until further developments.

Who wins? Netbooks, smartbooks, and Google's Chrome OS

From Ars Technica -

Based on a partial list of hardware manufacturers that support the Chrome OS - Acer, ASUS, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba, it seems likely that Chrome will emerge as the OS of the so-called smartbooks (netbooks that use ARM processors instead of Intel's Atom) and as a complement to Windows on netbooks.

Currently, ARM-based smartbooks have insufficient power to satisfy even netbook users, whose own Atom experience have already toned down their expectations. In addition, there is no ideal OS for the smartbooks yet, with Android being more of a mobile phone OS at this time. However, the next generation of ARM processors, the Core A9, due in 2010, should be a more robust processor and a more heavyweight (in terms of multitasking, performance, stability, and APIs). With the right OS, a Core A9 smartbook should be able to do cloud computing just fine. And that OS will likely be Chrome.

When this happens, users can have both Chrome OS and Windows on Atom-based netbooks. For Google apps and surfing, they can quick boot to Chrome; for all others they can boot up Windows.