UK Exclusive Preview : Pink Pegatron Smartbook

Now for the interesting part. There will be smartbook-like devices available before Christmas. The Bill of Material for the Pegatron smartbook is only $120 which means that the model should be available for £200 and possibly much, much less. 

Manufacturers may or may not decide to bundle SD Card with their products and although the Pegatron Smartbook did not come with an integrated 3G modem, chances are that final production models will.

As mentioned before, Smartbooks are only one of the many devices that will be build around the ARM platform and that's the common denominator across all the smartbook-esque gadgets to be launched over the next six months.

Ian told us that unlike the EEE PC, there will not be a set launch date and instead products may appear on the market in waves.

And there will be far more form factors involved than with the EEE PC. ARM has six public silicon partners where netbooks had one - Intel - and Ian told us that ALL of them - including Nvidia - were vying to produce products around the ARM technology. 

At the last count, there were nine platforms supporting ARM including Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Android and Chrome OS. That's 54 possible permutations compared to just TWO for the Netbook. 

Obviously, we are not taking into consideration Apple OS, Blackberry and WebOS, all of which run on ARM.

As for the Pegatron, well, this offshoot of Asus will not apparently be selling smartbooks (although the smartbook we tested had the Pegatron logo on it). It is in fact an ODM, which will build smartbooks for other companies. Stay tune for more as the story of Smartbooks unfolds.