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The netbook market still feels a bit like the Wild West. Example: On Monday, companies received the all-clear to continue calling netbooks,Cheap office standard 2010, well, netbooks.
The mobile device company Psion had the rights to the “netbook” trademark,Office 2007 Standard Product Key, and used the brand with portable computers that it sold many years back. Intel and Dell sought to wrestle the name away from Psion, saying netbook was a generic industry term. This week, Psion and Intel settled their disagreement, with Psion saying it would voluntarily pull its trademark registrations for the term.
Of course, just as that naming issue is solved, companies making small computers based on ARM chips have started to call their devices smartbooks.
Then there is the software side of things. For months, Intel has found itself in the odd position of both championing and discrediting netbooks, almost all of which run today on the company’s Atom chip.
Intel has been dead set on making sure that people know netbooks do not perform as well as full-blown PCs. The company insists on pointing this out because it wants netbooks to function as complements to regular PCs rather than replacements. That approach leads to Intel’s selling more expensive chips than the Atom chips that go into netbooks. So Intel has been quick to point out that netbooks struggle to handle things like high-definition video.
Adobe has stepped in to solve this problem. At the Computex trade show here in Taipei, Adobe announced deals with Broadcom and Nvidia, both of which make graphics chips that link with Atom chips, to produce a version of Flash that handles HD video well. Flash will direct graphics-heavy jobs to special graphics chips rather than to the Atom chip.
The fresh Flash should arrive by early 2010.
Also, RealNetworks said this week that it would adapt its media player software for netbooks. Of particular note, Real plans to work closely with makers of the Linux operating system, which is good news for the ARM crowd, since their machines will rely on Linux.
All told, the software makers are starting to overcome the limitations of netbooks,Office Professional 2010 X86, which handle surfing the Internet well but have struggled with more demanding software.
These improvements could make Intel’s life more difficult as netbooks turn into better PC replacements.
Oddly,Windows 7 Home Premium Sale, Intel’s knocks against the software available for netbooks run against its overall marketing around Atom.
Intel wants Atom to end up as a popular chip for cellphones. It has argued that Atom’s great mobile strength is its ability to run regular PC software,Microsoft Office Professional 2010 Key, since Atom relies on Intel’s standard x86 architecture rather than the ARM architecture used in most cellphones.
Cellphone and software makers often have to create custom software for various flavors of the ARM chip today but would have to do less work to adapt their software to Atom.
And yet Intel has maintained that software is a struggle with Atom on netbooks.
Such contortions are understandable given that netbooks have taken off like wildfire since their introduction a couple of years ago. Intel, Microsoft and PC makers are still trying to figure out how these low-cost devices will affect their profits over the long haul.