Asus boss Jerry Shen late at an investor conference yesterday, said his company is an Android-based SmartBook on shelves by early 2010. Reversing earlier doubts about a market for such a system, says Shen, based on a portable Snapdragon, Qualcomm’s chips and the Google mobile OS should be the first “secret weapon” for the company.

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Specifications are not available, but Smart Books are normally with 1 GHz or faster processors and a relatively low amount of RAM and permanent storage, since they almost exclusively depend on, Linux-based operating systems such as Android, which a light footprint.

The introduction of a SmartBook is a blow to Intel, which currently have allegedly forced a near-total control over the Netbook category with its Atom chip, and ASUS is one SmartBook prototype at Computex hiding in June. The SmartBook category just below the netbook in the price, but offer much the same performance using a highly optimized ARM architecture and low overhead in comparison to Windows XP or Windows 7.

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