marypcbuk

Last year Qualcomm came up with the term smartbook for things between and smartphone and a netbook. Great word, we thought (maybe not such a good concept; the iPhone might break the mould but Webpads and UMPCs and MIDs haven't made much of a dent in the market). I hadn't heard the term often from anyone but Qualcomm until HP's Phil McKinney used it at CES to describe the Android netbook he was showing off, and I haven't heard it since. The little note that I just spotted on the bottom of that interview might explain why smartbook isn't part of geek vocabulary (along with the lack of actual smartbooks on the market): "Smartbook is a registered trademark of Smartbook AG, but in this interview McKinney uses smartbook as a generic term for a device which falls between smartphone and netbook." It's not like Qualcomm to miss a trademark, even if it doesn't cover the US; in much of Europe, Korea, Russia, Australia and Singapore, smartbook means an Atom smartbook from Smartbook AG. And OSNews amusingly speculates about why Smartbook is asking news sites not to use smartbook as a generic term.