The Coming $200 Netbook

Wired reports: Eyeing that $400 netbook? How about getting one for half the price in just a few months?

Freescale is racing to get netbooks out this summer, featuring the company's chips, that would offer up to eight hours of battery life, be significantly thinner than existing designs and priced under $200.

"We are taking dead aim at the netbook space," says Glen Burchers, marketing director at Freescale."The value proposition that Freescale brings is dramatically lower power consumption and even lower prices."

Netbooks have become the fastest growing segment in the PC market, with about 15 million devices sold worldwide in 2008. This year, despite the economic slowdown, sales could double says ABI Research. So far Intel's family of Atom-based processors released last year have dominated the market. But Atom processors offer just about three hours of battery life while users are clamoring for more.

Freescale hopes its new line of chips could make a dent in Intel's market share. Last month, the company introduced the i.MX515 processor that is based on the 1GHz CPU from Intel rival ARM. The chip includes high performance multimedia processing and supports embedded 3G connectivity. "We can combine processor, graphic chips and memory bridge into a single chip, which means netbooks based on the Freescale platform will be just about 15-mm thick," says Burchers.

On Tuesday Freescale said it has tied up with additional partners to expand operating system options for netbooks based on its processor. Freescale processors will support Android and Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Xandros. The company says its hopes to have its processors-based netbooks in production by the middle of the year and hopes to have the products in retail stores in time for the 2009 holiday shopping season.

It won't be an easy ride for Freescale as it tries to catch up to Intel's Atom processor, which has an 18-month headstart. Yet Freescale is betting that its lower prices and promise of higher battery life will draw in buyers.

"When end users are presented with a differentiation that dramatic, they won't be concerned with how early a processor was available in the market," says Burchers.