I quote others in order to better express my own self - Montaigne
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Lenovo lets the sun shine on smartbook
HOT ON THE HEELS of its Edge notebook launch, Lenovo has unveiled a smartbook, dubbed Skylight.
The 'somewhere between a smartphone and a netbook' device looks a lot like a netbook, with a 10.1-inch display and a full szed keyboard, but it runs on a 1GHz processor based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset and features an instant on Linux based operating system and built-in 3G support for more smartphone-like behaviour.
Weighing in at under two pounds, the Skylight includes 20GB of standard flash based storage - about 14GB of which will be free - and Lenovo reckons that it will have over 10 hours of active battery life. Owners will also get 2GB of cloud storage thrown in as well.
The slimmed down Linux OS will come with around 18 preloaded web based widgets for popular sites and applications such as social notworking and media content providers.
"Skylight combines the long battery life and connectivity of a smartphone with the full web browsing and multimedia experience of a netbook to create one of the first devices in this developing smartbook category," said Peter Gaucher, executive director of Mobile Internet Product Management at Lenovo.
The company reckons the Skylight will be part of a growing number of devices that sit somewhere in the gap between phones and notebooks. The gap was narrowed in recent years with the development of netbooks and fully featured smartphones, with these new smartbooks and tablets tipping up to fill in the last remaining distance.
Lenovo has partnered with AT&T for mobile broadband access in the US under the operator's Dataconnect plan.
The Skylight smartbook will be coming to the US first in April, landing in China and Europe later this year. Pricing will start at $499 at full retail price, but this will almost certainly be subsidised by the network operators if bought as part of a contract. µ
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Make it fit where my car stereo "was" and make it do these things and I will buy one soon:
* GPS sat nav Tomtom preferred.
* DVD player to keeps kids entertained.
* Mobile internet sim slot for internet access.
* TV (proper TV) analog and digital freeview.
* Remote control and steering wheel control and voice control.
* Synchronisable with my mp3/phone/laptop email/facebook and other stuff.
* Gaming - proper games for me and the kids.
* DAB Radio.
And that's about it. I would love one of those in my car so much I would tell the car maker that I wouldn't buy their overpriced £1,500 satnav, £1000+ dvd player, £600 multi-cd player.
i totally agree. $500? it's like buying a smartphone without a plan! but, it's a smart*book*
yes, very smart of someone to spend $500 on a computer that is less capable than my eee
Please stop regurgitating Microsofts
crap marketing speel. They are still
netbooks
MS and Intel created that term as well; as far as I am concerned, they're laptops, plain and simple. Those who stick with the standard OS can do so, but a full Debian + KDE4 install runs just fine on my EeePC 701 and EeePC 900a.
Notebooks, all the way.
500 bucks for something less powerful and less versatile than a full-fldged atom netbook is a joke.
A Netbook is really just a tiny cheap laptop, but it's still a complete x86 computer. A Smartbook is more like a smartphone in that it uses an ARM based chip, not x86. You won't be seeing Win XP or Windows 7 on a smartbook.
Please stop regurgitating Microsofts crap marketing speel. They are still netbooks regardless of what the press reports. Anyway, this is a great netbook and it will sell fantastically.