Mobile managers tasked with keeping tabs on employees’ devices may very well soon have a new category -- “smartbooks” – to add to the list.

 

Flash forward to 2015. That's the year 163 million smartbooks will be shipped, according to new data from ABI Research (News - Alert).

 

“As ABI Research defines it, a smartbook is a low-powered device running a mobile operating system that is always connected, either via WiFi (News - Alert) or (more often) using cellular or mobile broadband,” said ABI Research senior analyst Jeff Orr. “Smartbooks can take many different shapes.”

 

A subset of mobile Internet devices and netbooks, smartbooks “address the same potential users, usage, pricing and market needs,” Orr said. “The difference is that they don’t use x86 processors.”

 

The very first smartbook models only recently appeared, in 2008, but with models like Apple’s (News - Alert) iPad gaining fame months before release, the category only appears to be growing.  

 

According to ABI, Qualcomm (News - Alert) and Freescale have been the largest promoters of the smartbook concept. Others active in this market include chipmakers such as TI and NVIDIA, which are producing ARM (News - Alert)-based processors.

 

 However, “the idea of ‘a smartbook’ doesn’t resonate with anybody thinking of buying such a device,” said Orr. “Vendors should avoid creating a separate market category with a new name, instead accepting that they are competing in an established category. Consumers hear about netbooks as alternatives to laptops and MIDs as alternatives to mobile phones, and can understand that. We believe the best opportunity in this ultra-mobile device market lies in new form-factors.”