Isaiah's Tech

DigiTimes has just mentioned something pretty cool that's apparently coming from a supplier's mouth. The report says that Asus is looking to really undercut the netbooks that we're used to seeing right now. Apparently, the company plans to launch a $200 to $250 netbook running on Google's Android or, hopefully, Chrome OS. The notebook will reportedly be a 10 or 11-inch model and will be free subsidized on a carrier if you wan to sign a 6-month contract. Hmm, this might be something I'm interested in if it's a $200 netbook running Chrome OS.

[Crunch Gear]

More tablets from Asus and these are actually the more interesting ones. These tablets are both powered by Nvidia's Tegra 2 chipset and they're both sporting 10.1-inch displays along with QWERTY keyboards. The first one on the left is the Eee Pad Slider which sports a 1,280 x 800 resolution IPS display, miniHDMI / miniUSB ports, a microSD card slot, a rear-facing 5MP camera with an LED flash, a front-facing 1.3MP webcam, and Android "Honeycomb". The body is 0.5-inches and it reportedly weighs 2.2 pounds.

Now, getting to the tablet on the right. It's reportedly called the Eee Transformer which you might've heard about before. Like I said, it's sporting a 10.1-inch display and you'll be able to dock it on a body which will give you a keyboard along with a touchpad. Basically, you'll be able to use Android like a netbook. Specs are just about the same as the Eee Pad Slider, but the dock on this bad boy will reportedly give you another 16 hours of battery life because it has an integrated one. Interesting, indeed; if only I could get my hands on either of them.

[Engadget]

Over the weekend, a new smartbook was spotted from Lenovo that'll be a part of their IdeaPad Series. This smartbook was reportedly being powered by a Freescale i.MX515 SoC with an ARM Cortex A8 processor. Apparently, this chip will give the smartbook smartphone-like battery life, but we'll see how that works out. We'll see how well the multitasking will work on this sucker.

[Engadget]

It's a sad day for some people - including me. Lenovo has just mentioned that the Skylight smartbook and their IdeaPad U1 won't be released. They referred to the U1 as a concept and the Skylight OS found on their smartbook will be replaced with Android. They'll likely spend their time tweaking the Android UI to closely resemble their Skylight OS and they're looking to release some Android-based devices in Q4 of this year. Maybe this will include the smartbook that looked pretty good. Hopefully, they intend to release the U1 in the future because that was actually something I was looking forward to.

[Engadget]

Cherrypal has just released and shown off their latest netbooks, both dubbed the Asia. This comes in two flavours, a 7-inch and a 10.1-inch one that are available for $99 and $150, respectively. Both of them are running Android 1.6 along with a "good enough" VIA 533MHz ARM9 CPU. The 10.1-inch model throws in an integrated 1.3MP webcam for safe measures, but who knows how well this works in the real world. Engadget did point out that they tried these both themselves and they were running quite slow so "you get what you pay for."

[Engadget]

Apparently, Acer is set to showcase their Chrome OS devices in the near future. This is going to happen within the next one to two weeks so we could either see it at Google I/O in a couple of days or we could see it at Computex which takes place in the first week of June. We don't know what these devices will be but they'll likely be netbooks / smartbooks. These devices are scheduled to hit the market in the second half of this year, so we'll still have to wait a while until we see how well Google can integrate the cloud into this OS.

Update: Apparently, Acer is holding a global event at the end of this month and, unfortunately, Engadget has mentioned that no Chrome OS devices are going to be shown off. However, they do mention that we could still see those Chrome OS devices by the end of devices but they might not show up at Google I/O, this Acer event, and Computex in early June. Anything can happen though, so hope for the best.

[Tech Oat]

It looks like HP Compaq Airlife 100 smartbook is about to become available exclusively in Europe right now for €229 ($302 USD) thanks to Telefonica. They'll be launching this smartbook in the middle of May and you'll need a €48 ($63 USD) monthly plan if you want to get it. The other plan is getting the smartbook for €299 ($395 USD) and you'll only have to pay €39 ($52 USD). The Airlife 100 smartbook won't be hitting the US if you trust HP's word.

[Engadget]

In case you're interested, the whole spec sheet for the HP Compaq Airlife 100 smartbook has just leaked out and I'm still trying to wonder why I would choose a smartbook over a netbook. We've known the majority of the spec sheet for a while now but in case you needed reassurance, they're below. Check out the specs via Gizmodo.




[Gizmodo]

Bad news for those of you waiting for the Lenovo Skylight smartbook. It's reportedly been delayed to July in the US (via AT&T). China looks like they'll be getting first dibs on this smartbook in May and a couple of other places will get a stab at it in June. The delay is reportedly because they're still working on a couple of things to improve.

Update: According to Digitimes, this smartbook is being delayed because it's not as smooth as the iPad. Who knows what they'll do to this thing, but maybe they're thinking about adding a touchscreen on this.

[Netbooked]

If you live in Japan you should look out for this new product that KDDI is about to release. This is the Sharp IS01, which may look like a netbook, smartbook, or an MID, but apparently it works more like a smartphone. This "smartphone" packs a 5-inch multitouch display with a 480 x 960 resolution, a QWERTY keyboard, EV-DO Rev. A connectivity, a 1-Seg TV tuner, WiFi b/g / Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR support, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz CPU, 3GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot, a 5MP on the back, a 0.43MP front-facing camera, and Android 1.6.

The battery life is said to be about 5 hours of talk time and 200 hours of standby time which is pretty impressive. Developers should be getting this in May, while consumers will have to wait until October of this year. The price hasn't been mentioned yet.

Update: Phandroid found a video of this device so I've pasted it below. Enjoy!





[Liliputing, Slash Gear]

We know that the Mobinnova Beam smartbook is going to hit AT&T, but it looks like Mobinnova has tweaked it again. This time it's been caught demoing Android instead of Windows CE. They also decided to modify the keyboard a bit and they've decided to have CinemaNow pre-installed on the smartbook. Unfortunately, it won't have access to the Android Market, instead Mobinnova will launch their own custom app store.

[Netbooked]

We saw a couple of devices with Nvidia's Tegra 2 graphics at CES 2010 a couple of weeks ago, but it looks like there'll be more to showcase at MWC 2010 this year. They'll be found in tablets and "other" devices as well. This could likely include netbooks / smartbooks, and we could possibly see them in smartphones as well - or MIDs. We'll just have to see what happens in 3 weeks time.

[Slash Gear]

An HP smartbook has just been spotted at the FCC. We don't know if it's a tablet of a netbook-like device yet because there are no solid photos on what it looks like yet. HP could be looking to launch this device as the Compaq AirLife 100 when they release it. All we know about this smartbook so far is that it will have Bluetooth / WiFi b/g support and 3G connectivity.

[Liliputing]

Although it definitely won't be what you see above (the modded Dell Mini netbook) Quanta is working on a smartbook that will feature a 3.5-inch touchscreen display. I don't know how that would classify it as a smartbook in theory, since some smartphones (or even superphones) have larger displays than that. 3.5-inches would leave it on par with current iPhones, so uhh, yeah. The way Quanta describes it, it'll basically be a smartphone to be honest. This "smartbook" will be utilizing an ARM / Qualcomm CPU so look out for it whenever.

[Engadget]

Engadget got their hands on an Asus / Pegatron Neo smartbook running Google's Android OS. Along with that there's WiFi and Nvidia's new Tegra 2 chipset. As you can see in the picture above it's got a chiclet keyboard and a pretty damn thin body. The full spec sheet wasn't mentioned yet and neither was the price or availability. However it should be available by the end of the year.

[Engadget]