Digital Home Thoughts: Behold the Compaq Airlife 100

"If you use the Airlife 100 as a traditional laptop, as one might expect from something that looks like a traditional laptop, you will run into issues. Not only is there a learning curve and a new set of usage methods but you’ll trip yourself up looking for features that you take for granted on a standard netbook. The USB ports are missing for example. This is a slave device designed to be connected, in much the same way as an iPad, to a PC. This isn’t a device that you can simply plug a printer, webcam or smartphone into. User confusion, frustration and disappointment is going to feature heavily in early feedback."

A lot of the review reads like what one would with a smartphone, just in a different form factor. It has the same strengths such as a really long battery life, and weaknesses like speed. One thing I find troubling, however, is the fragmentation of app stores. It seems as if every Android based tablet/smartbook coming out does not hook into the existing Android Market, but provides their own. Sad. Sad, sad, sad! Without that benefit, I do not really see a huge benefit to smartbooks as they are, when compared to netbooks. Sure, the smartbook may be always connected and always on, but is that really needed? It does not take that long for a netbook to come out of sleep mode and update itself.