Windows 7 Tablet Demo

Everybody wants to be in the tablet game.

"Smartbook" Category Crushed by Tablets, at Least for the Moment

Whatever became of “smartbooks”? At last January’s Consumer Electronics Show, some big hardware companies were using that name to describe new low-end computing devices that look like small laptops but use different chips and software. But that was before the iPad.

Now industry buzz has shifted pretty dramatically away from smartbooks to forthcoming slate-style devices that are expected to challenge Apple’s latest hit. “It’s fair to say the iPad and tablets are resetting everybody’s roadmap and forcing them to think about they are going to do next in a different light,” says Henri Richard, senior vice president and chief sales and marketing officer for Freescale Semiconductor, which has been marketing chips for smartbooks.

But backers of the concept say it’s not so much that smartbooks are stalled. Rather, there are simply so many new hardware and software options–and consumer preferences are so uncertain–that it’s too early to tell exactly what the most popular designs will be and what people will wind up calling them.

“This market between the phone and the laptop is an area that is undefined,” says Steve Mollenkopf, a Qualcomm executive vice president who is also president of its chip unit. “You will see a proliferation of different devices.”

Whether there is a single tablet category or possibly multiple categories, or whether tablets simply reshape existing categories, is yet to be determined. What does seem to be clear is that all the devices are intended to be "always connected."

From a suppliers’ perspective, companies that make cellphones or components for them want to expand their turf into larger products. That includes companies like Qualcomm, Freescale, Nvidia and others that have offered chips for the handset market based on technology from ARM Holdings. They can’t offer the ability to run conventional PC programs, but can boast long battery life and stress the “instant-on” nature of their machines–two of the chief selling points of smartbooks.

At the same time, makers of conventional laptops and their suppliers are trying to get into smaller devices. Chip giant Intel, for example, has helped popularized low-priced laptops called netbooks that mainly run Microsoft Windows. Intel has also been talking for some time about an even smaller, keyboardless category called MIDS, or mobile Internet devices–a term that seems to have been overshadowed by small-sized tablets.

But another way to look at the situation stems from what tasks a user is tackling. For example, touching the screen is the most efficient way to get some kinds of things done; for some chores–like composing a long document–a physical keyboard is the way to go.

Either way, at least for the moment, tablets have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Sprint HTC Evo: the Video

Ad for the new Sprint HTC Evo, coming June 4.

Verizon Says it Has No Immediate Plans to Sell iPhone

The  longest-running rumor many of us can cite at the moment is the nearly-constant expectation that Verizon Wireless is going to carry the Apple iPhone. Alas, the rumors, which have heated up again recently, seem to be equally false. No iPhone at Verizon for the foreseeable future, it seems.

Froyo Feature: Threaded call log | Android Central

Android 2.2 (Froyo) features threaded call logs that collapse multiple calls from the same person or entity into a single pane that can be tapped to expand the list. It saves screen real estate.

Cisco Releases Annual Global Bandwidth Forecast

Cisco's latest visual networking index shows the expected "up to the right" growth curve. No surprise there.

The growth in traffic will continue to be dominated by video, exceeding 91 percent of global consumer IP traffic by 2014. That statistic simply screams for network management to ensure the quality of video experience.

Apple Wants to Replace, Not Compete, in Search

Apple CEO Steve Jobs says his company will not take on Google in the search business. That's a bit of legalese, one might argue. Apple does not so much want to compete in search as to make it irrelevant in a mobile context.

"Competing" implies one wishes to win something. "Displacing and replacing " is more like what Apple wants to do.

Many of Apple’s 200,000 app downloads, for example, are simply shortcuts to the web which eliminates the need for Google’s search functions.

Apple already competes against Google in the mobile phone, mobile advertising and operating systems areas, and soon there will be competition from Google in the music and mobile apps arenas as well.

Apple Says It Will Not Take On Google In Search, But It Already Has – 24/7 Wall St.