What it Takes to Build the Ideal Android Smartbook

The 10 essential components for a smartbook
Laptops are too complex and bulky. Netbooks are too dumbed-down. What the world needs is a smartbook, which combines the best attributes of a laptop, netbook, and smartphone. Here are the 10 key attributes an Android smartbook should have.

http://www.cio.com/article/510645/What_it_Takes_to_Build_the_Ideal_Android_Smartbook

1. Multitouch screen
As users of Acer's Aspire Android netbook have reported, a multitouch trackpad is not an adequate substitute. You need a touchscreen that supports gestures, as the iPhone has amply demonstrated. A gesture-capable trackpad is fine as an addition for that touchscreen, but not as a replacement.

2. Android buttons

Android smartphones use four dedicated hardware buttons — Home, Menu, Back, and Search — as integral components of the user interface. They may look a bit different from one device to another (as you can see in the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris here), but they perform the same actions. An Android smartbook needs to have them too.

3. Full-sized keyboard

Some netbooks take little to inappropriate lengths, as it were, with keyboards that are just slightly smaller than full size: generally about 90 percent as large. Small keyboards are workable when you can operate them with two thumbs, such as on a BlackBerry Bold, but on a laptop-style device, the 10 percent size difference is not worth the pain it induces in users. Any ideal smartbook will have a full-sized keyboard — just as ideal netbooks such as the Samsung N120 already do.

4. Solid-state drive
SSDs can double battery life, as well as spiff performance by a factor of two or three. And that all-important startup time will always be much shorter when booting from a solid-state device. As their prices come down, SSDs simply make sense as the de facto smartbook drive.