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The major players in the Smartbook market, processors, operating systems, corporations, retailers
Smartbook Processors
ARM - a processor architecture from ARM Holdings, based in Cambridge, England. ARM powered 98% of the billion mobile phones sold each year as of 2007. ARM holdings license out their technology to other semiconductor manufacturers, so for instance it is Samsung that produce the ARM processor found in Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, since the iPod Touch is a slimmed down version of the iPhone without the telephony.
MIPS - a processor architecture from MIPS Technologies based in California, USA.
Clones - processors from Asia which provide the same instruction sets, for instance the Ingenic XBurst MIPS clone
Smartbook operating systems
Microsoft. A popular choice for some smartbook ARM-based manufacturers in 2009 was the Windows CE v5.0 operating system. Whist WinCE v5.0 is quite old, it must have been a good fit for the hardware at the time, although it will be interesting to see if smartbooks are released with more modern Windows Mobile operating systems in the future.
Debian Linux. There is a variant of Debian which works on MIPS and this has been tweaked for the current crop of MIPS-based smartbooks out there. Debian also has an ARM port, which means that there is the possibility of more linux variants on smartbooks, although at present choice is definitely limited (it is certainly not the same as the choice of linux builds for PCs).
Google Android. Whilst no google android smartbook has yet been released, the operating system is designed to support ARM-based architectures
Google Chrome OS. Whilst no google chrome os smartbook has yet been released, the operating system is designed to support ARM-based architectures
Apple. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the cut-down OSX operating system (iPhone OS) on Apple's iPhone or iPod Touch could not be tweaked in the future for smartbooks, and perhaps Apple's much rumoured 2010 tablet the Apple iPad is already demonstrating this.
Nokia has been working with Symbian (Series 60) and the Maemo operating systems, both working on the ARM processors, for its smartphones, but so far nothing in the way of a Nokia smartbook with these operating systems has reached the UK market, but hopefully this situation will change in 2010.
Smartbook retailers in the UK
So far the retailers have been limited to either specialist electronics retailers like Maplin, online retailers via Amazon or eBay, and entertainment retailers like HMV and Play.com.
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