Two years on, netbooks on verge of big shake-up

"Qualcomm has produced a new chip called the Snapdragon that uses less power than Intel's Atom, so it runs cooler and doesn't require a heatsink. That means laptops built with it can be thinner and have a longer battery life -- Qualcomm expects between 8 and 10 hours. The chip comes with a feature that will be appreciated by any traveller: compatibility with both major cell phone standards in use worldwide.

"But there are potential drawbacks. Qualcomm's processors don't understand the x86 instruction set used by chips from Intel and AMD, so they won't run mainstream Windows. Instead, netbook makers are turning to Linux, which has been ported to many non-x86 processor architectures."

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