Qualcomm’s CEO Paul Jacobs Talks About Smartbooks and More!
by Kara Swisher
Posted on November 16, 2009 at 9:36 AM PT
When in San Diego recently, BoomTown paid a visit to Qualcomm and its Chairman and CEO, Paul Jacobs, to talk about a new “smartbook” device the wireless-technology company unveiled last week.
Well, sort of–while I got a gander at a prototype, the real one is not actually set to debut until the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in January, where Jacobs will deliver his first keynote address.
There, he will show off what is essentially a combination of a smartphone and a netbook using wireless technology and an always-on capability, an attempt to push yet another innovative device type onto the market.
It will use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip, and the first ones will be made by Lenovo and offered by AT&T (T)–to try to get the device widely used by consumers.
Smartbooks will be videocentric and have a Linux-based user interface, a keyboard and a range of popular widget applications, such as email and Facebook.
Obviously, this will be a competitive market and, really, Apple (AAPL), with its upcoming tablet computer, is also pushing into this mobile-phone-that-ate-computers space.
Moving into new markets has been important for Jacobs and Qualcomm (QCOM), which recently gave fiscal-year forecasts under Wall Street expectations and has had a rocky time in recent quarters.
Along with the econalypse, the company has attributed this to the decline in handsets with CDMA wireless technology, which Qualcomm pioneered.
Here’s my interview with Jacobs about smartbooks, as well as augmented reality and the company’s new FLO TV device, coming out soon. Plus, a wireless bandaid!:
Comments
Nobody is going to carry around a medium sized computer. It needs to fit in your pocket.
Posted by David Owens at November 16th, 2009 at 10:09 am> Nobody is going to carry
> around a medium sized
> computer. It needs to fit
> in your pocket.
If you spend any time at all with an iPhone or iPod touch, you’ll be happy with their power and their portability, but you also will see the need for a 10-inch version, for times when a larger screen outweighs the need for pocket transport, but you still want that same simplicity and ease of use and less than a kilo weight.
A 10-inch display can show a Web page, a DVD-quality video, a photograph, or a page from an eBook or PDF, all at what is essentially full-size. It can run full-size apps like a spreadsheet. If it has touch, it can replace all kinds of paper, you can hand it to people to sign a PDF or tap an “agree” button and you won’t have to explain how to use the device because it’s “see button, push button”.
Imagine a writer in the 1950’s with a typewriter and paper, a stack of reference books, and a tiny pocket notebook. The notebook computer replaces the typewriter and paper, a 10-inch tablet replaces the stack of reference books, and an iPhone replaces the pocket notebook.
So we are already paying out our tablet PC money, but we’ve been getting back stacks of reference books. Now, the cost of paper and ink is so high that print publishers could subsidize a big iPod in the same way AT&T subsidizes the iPhone and still come out ahead. The only argument against a 10-inch tablet is the stack of books. It’s one or the other. Note that the tablet PC is becoming the cheaper option fast.
Another way to look at it is that the print medium is going to switch from ink on paper to HTML5/PDF on tablets.
Posted by Fred Hamranhansenhansen at November 16th, 2009 at 6:58 pm