By Oo Gin Lee

It is not a smartphone, not a notebook, but a smartbook.

Yes, you heard right - the offspring of the two devices that shares more than just its parents' names.

You've probably heard of Apple's iPad.

But there are many more.

This year, smartbooks are the new "in" thing with 20 to 30 different models making their debut from big brands like Lenovo and HP to relative unknowns like Foxconn and Notion Ink.

According to market analyst ABI Research, over 160 million smartbooks will ship to the world by 2015.

The smartbook is touted as offering the ideal experience for the Web generation which needs to be always connected to Gmail, Facebook and YouTube.

So how is the child better than its parents' The smartphone fails because of its limited real estate.

The screen is still too small and it lacks a full-sized keyboard.

The laptop may have the size and the processing muscles, but it draws too much power and thus suffers from short battery life.

Smartbooks will merge the best of both worlds.

Like smartphones, they pack "all day" battery life lasting 10 hours and more, always-on connectivity to the Web through 3G and Wi-Fi, instant power on and off and one-second sleep-to-wake.

Like laptops, they have larger screens of between five and 10 inches and a fully capable Web browser that can run Flash (which most smartphones cannot).

Lenovo Skylight Specs: Qualcomm Snapdragon 1 GHz processor Linux OS 10.1-inch 1280X720 resolution screen 10 hours of battery life 20GB flash memory storage 3G Price: US$ 499 (S$700) Availability: April this year (US); Not confirmed for Singapore yet.

With Flash, you can experience YouTube, Facebook and other websites in their intended full glory instead of the dumbed down experience on smartphones.

They can be touch-screen tablets like the iPad or full-keyboard clamshells like the laptops today.

But wait a second.

Don't consumers already have those affordable nifty mini-laptops called netbooks that can do all of this?

The smartbook proponents will tell you netbooks won't quite fit the bill because netbooks run on the power-hungry "Wintel" PC architecture as the normal laptops, which takes too long to boot up and still cannot have enough battery to last a full working day.

This is all very confusing to consumers because a smartbook and a netbook could look exactly the same on the outside and yet end up completely different inside.

The easy way to understand the difference is to look at who and what is powering the devices.

In the netbook world, these are the Intel Atom 1.6GHz chips.

In smartbooks, the processors are of the same mould as the ones powering the smartphones.

The Lenovo Skylight and HP Compaq Airlife smartbooks, for instance, use the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor found in my Google Nexus One phone.

Qualcomm is one of the leading mobile phone chipmakers in the world.

Other smartbook chipmakers include Freescale (which makes the chips in Amazon's Kindle), Nvidia (which makes the powerful graphics cards in the PCs) and even Apple (which makes the Apple A4 chips in the iPad through a chip company called P.A. Semi which it acquired in 2008).

All of these chips are variants of ARM processors.

ARM licenses the blueprints but does not make the chips.

Think of it as the "smartphone and others" gang trying to break into the PC world largely controlled by Microsoft and Intel.

The jury's still out on whether the smartphone chips can be as fast as the Intels, but consumers couldn't care less so long as they are fast enough for their Web apps.

The problem, however, is that Windows will not run on smartphone processors, which in turn means that you cannot run Microsoft Office, Windows games and all your other favourite software.

For their operating system (OS), smartbooks will turn to Google's OS for mobile phones called Android, its upcoming Chrome OS specifically designed for Web-only mini-laptops and various versions of Linux.