A few months ago, our very own Sascha Pallenberg broke a story which really made me smile. Honestly, this new development has me sitting here with a full toothy grin. Do you remember Smartbook AG? The firm which told our good friend Cam from Tweak Town and countless other bloggers that they were not allowed to use the term smartbook as they had trademarked it? If you want to read Sascha’s TechCrunch feature on the story please click here.
Well, Sascha did some digging and discovered that it was just a two man operation working out of some obscure little office in Germany AND that they had plans to release their own smartbook! Turns out that smartbook is now ready for release, as you can read over at Liliputing.
The world really hasn’t taken too much notice of the cease and desist letters being sent out by Smartbook AG. After all, Lenovo is calling the Skylight a Smartbook, and it certainly doesn’t seem to bother Lenovo. It’s rather more likely that the whole fuss was created as an attention seeking marketing ploy, to garner attention for Smartbook AG’s very own smartbook, set to be released in just over a week at CeBit in Hannover, Germany.
The company’s Smartbook Logo features a 3G UMTS modem, like other smartbooks, and it has a screen, keyboard and pretty good battery life. But that’s where the similarities end.
The Smartbook Logo will feature an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, an Intel CULV processor, an HDMI output and Windows 7 Home Premium. It will boast 1GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive and a battery that Smartbook AG says will be good for up to eight hours of run time. The form factor is larger than any other smartbook currently on the market, as the emphasis on portability has kept everyone else in the 10 inch space.
The laptop will weigh 1.3kg (about 2.86 pounds) and sell in Europe for about 699 Euros ($943 US), which is a little on the steep side if you ask us.
We also hope that sneaking in a trademark after a term starts to become a trend isn’t going to be the new ‘must have’ marketing scheme. Industry analysts are already warning manufacturers not to push for a different classification of device as the diversification in terminology will only serve to confuse the befuddles consumer even further.
But kudos to Smartbook AG for its marketing efforts, as it certainly seems the firm has managed to achieve yet another story on Netbook News. And if the firm hadn’t almost sued us and everyone else we know and love, we’d probably never even have noticed its rather run-of-the-mill thin and light laptop with an Intel CULV processor.
