During a briefing before financial analysts Thursday, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs briefly demonstrated what was being touted as the world's first 'smart-book' device. The mobile device was featured because it is based on Qualcomm's new Snapdragon microprocessor. Though the new device from Lenovo will not formally debut until the Winter CES show in January, Jacobs said it's already slated to run on AT&T  's wireless network in the United States.
Designed to fit a mobile market niche that falls midway between a smartphone and a netbook, the device integrates many of the features found on today's smartphones but within a slightly larger form factor that sports a larger display and a full keyboard. Jacobs also noted that Lenovo's computing device represents the first full implementation of Adobe Flash 10 on an ARM-based processor that can even run video in high definition.
"One of the things that some of our competitors have been saying is that you can't get the full Internet experience on ARM because we didn't have Flash, and that's wrong," Jacobs told investors.
Size Matters
During the briefing, Jacobs placed his own handset next to the new product to demonstrate that Lenovo's device is about the same thickness as a Palm Pre. The Lenovo device sports a surprisingly big battery, which is mostly for supporting the display, Jacob noted.
Turn on the device and the screen instantly presents the user interface, which consists of six active widgets. "These are always on and always synchronizing your e-mail, Facebook status, the web, and all sorts of other stuff," Jacobs observed.
Jacobs said he believes Lenovo's new device will prove to be a compelling product. "It's going to change the experience of using the Internet on a device that has a full keyboard and a full-sized screen," he said.
However, Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi is unsure whether the new form factor is small enough to really go mass market in the way smartphones have. "To be successful, these products need to be pocketable so that users have them with them at all times," Milanesi said.
A More Profound Impact
Still, it's easy to see why Qualcomm is heavily promoting its ARM-based Snapdragon chips for deployment in mobile devices for data applications. By 2014, Jacobs told investors, the amount of mobile data traffic worldwide in a single month is expected to exceed the total amount of data traffic in all of 2008. (continued...)
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