Just as netbooks are meant to slot somewhere between smartphones and notebook PCs, smartbooks fill the even smaller niche between smartphones and netbooks. It’s only a matter of time before someone comes up with another “in between” form factor for us to consider.

The Skylight by Lenovo gets its juice from the 1GHZ Snapdragon chipset, offering plenty of processing power while retaining a more reasonable battery life. Features include a 10.1-inch screen, integrated AT&T 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi, a full keyboard, custom “web gadget” interface, and over ten hours of active battery life.

the expectation is that the Lenovo Skylight smartbook will sell for $499 when it goes on sale in April. AT&T will likely subsidize this price if you choose to latch onto a two-year data plan with big blue.

Source: Gizmodo

What are smartbooks exactly? Well, that’s the term was coined to refer to a new family of mobile devices that may look like netbooks but have smartphone-like guts. That’s because the new line of Asus Eee PC units will be powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor and Android operating system.

In this way, you get a netbook-like experience with its form factor, but you get a smartphone-like experience with the choice of processor and operating system. The kicker to the Asus “secret weapon” is that it should be priced at about $180. That’s cheaper than most new smartphones and netbooks. Asus is saying that its first smartbook should be ready “early next year.”

From what I can gather, the “smartbook” naming scheme comes by way of Qualcomm, referring to any netbooks that use their ARM-based processors. They used to say that these processors were necessary for Android, but Acer managed to port it over to their Atom-powered Aspire One.

Source: Gizmodo