You’ll be hearing a lot about Smartbooks in the weeks and months to come, they’re basically netbooks but operating on mobile OSs, as opposed to stuffy old computer ones.

Today at a Qualcomm Technologies press conference to announce the release of its new SnapDragon chipset, an Asus Eee PC was spotted running Google’s Android OS.

The shtick with Smarbooks is the idea that, because mobile OSs are designed to run on the teeny weenie processors found in smartphones, putting them on the larger Atom processors found in netbooks will boost their performance at key tasks such as web-browsing, text editing and VoIP.

Granted, mobile OSs aren’t designed for the netbook’s form factor, and concurrently things seem distinctly underwhelming from a UI perspective.

Which leads me to believe that maybe there’s a middle ground between the mobile OS and desktop OS that’s necessary for the Smartbook. A new, ultra-portable, but not over-simplified OS, that hits web browsing, email, media and text editing and not much else.

Xmas list 2010
1) Smartbook

Mark my words.

(Via TweakTown)