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A smartbook is an industry term first coined around 2008/2009 for an ultra-portable laptop computer that is smaller than a netbook, with a spec somewhere between a mobile phone (smartphone) and a netbook.
So far the common design of a smartbook is similar to a netbook, i.e. it looks like a netbook or laptop but smaller, with very different internal hardware to a normal netbook or laptop.
Whilst netbooks opt for Intel 386 chip architectures (386 compatible chips including Intel chips like Celeron, Intel Atom, AMD Sempron, VIA, etc) in common with larger laptops and desktop PCs, smartbooks generally opt for processor architectures more commonly found in mobile phones, like ARM, MIPS, XBurst (MIPS clone) processors, and it is because of this that the smartbook is very different to a netbook.
The state of the Smartbook market in 2009/2010 is very similar to the PC Apple Mac market a few years ago where 2 main architectures existed. With the PC Apple Mac market it used to be Intel 386 compatible architecture (PC compatible) for PCs and Motorola then PowerPC processors for Macs (before Macs moved over to Intel). Currently the 2 dominant Smartbook architectures are ARM and MIPs based platforms. With the current crop of Smartbooks in the UK at the end of 2009, if the smartbook is running Windows CE 5 then it is probably ARM-based, if it is running a linux variant then it is probably MIPS-based. And just like PC and Macs used to be, you wouldn't swap around operating systems on those very different architectures.
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