I thought Qualcomm were a relatively small outfit, until I found out they were placed #8 in the rankings of semiconductor companies by revenue last year. That put them ahead of companies like AMD, Broadcom and NVidia and just behind Sony. They grew by over 15% from 2007, having grown 24% from 2006 and they seem to show no signs of stopping.
Of course, much of their cash comes from 3G technology royalties...
The smartbook actually seems, to me at least, like a very nice candidate for Chrome OS. A smartbook with Chrome OS may even get me interested in smartbooks and Chrome OS. I mean, a day long battery life and a proper internet experience on a device that costs less than €200 sounds pretty tempting. I would even go that far as to claim that the smartbook will be dead on a arrival without Chrome OS. Unless some other OS (probably another Linux based OS) comes out and proves to be a good alternative (Mozilla, Intel, Canonical, anyone?).
"More practically however would be an Ubuntu/Linux operating system... or perhaps even Chrome OS...?"
In five or ten years time Chrome OS might be looked back on as a turning point when cloud computing got support from a major player in computing, but right now it's a tech demo. The articles on this site about the problems with mobile broadband illustrate some of the problems with Chrome OS. You won't be able to work until you reach home or work where you can use the wi-fi. So for the immediate future of Qualcomm I don't see Chrome as a big help. Was that just an excuse to plug an internal link?
Colour e-book readers do sound pretty snazzy however... can't wait until I can just wake up in the morning and pick-up the days papers to read at my leasure with none of the recycling.
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