Smartbooks are not a novel concept ateverything, but the rapid growth of the netbook and the rise oftablets have significantly impacted on PC makers willingness, oreagerness, to experiment with such a concept. The apparent reason isthat the chances of survival on today's market are ratherquestionable. On the other hand, there are however companies whosekeep with the industry is strong plenty for such an experiment to goby without serious consequences, and HP decided that it was time toattempt one out.


The HP Compaq Airlife smartbook hasbeen in development for some time and, rear in February, it wasstated that May would be the period when it would become available,at least in Spain. Today, on the final days of May upon us, reviewershave eventually handled to snatch the electronic and test it out.Unluckily, news is not everything positive.

Name: HP Compaq Airlife 100.jpg Views: 19 Size: 42.4 KB
Smartbooks arespecified, more or less, like ultra portable instrumented withnetbook specifications but the always-on capabilities of asmartphone. The Airlife has a 1024 x 768-result display and aconfiguration centered about a Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 ARMchipset, on a 1GHz processor. There are even 512MB of RAM available,as well as 16GB of internal flash storage and connectivity via 3G andWiFi. When appearing at these parts, one may place great wishes inthis newcomer. Unluckily, the Airlife does not perfectly appear tolive up to its hype.

Reviews produced by EngadgetSpanish and Carrypad praised the aesthetic value of the Android 1.6Compaq Airlife 100, but detected it lacking in terms of functioning,with most of the blame falling on the software. Also just supportinga extremely restricted number of video codecs, the smartbook failedto load Gmail completely, between other things.


This is rather an inauspicious state ofaffairs, viewing that the overall price is wanted to be just a someEuro lower as compared to that of a netbook on a Broadcom Crystal HDaccelerator. Perhaps HP has not still completed optimizing andrefining the gadget, but, also thus, there does not appear to be muchopportunity of it acquiring affirmed with the US market, alsosubsidized.