Nawaiya unveils 7-inch laptop

Nawaiya, a Dubai-based company, has designed one of the smallest laptops on the market, called PalmTop, with a 7-inch touch-screen, full PC and 3G capabilities, which also doubles as a mobile connectivity device, states Gulf News.

The laptop incorporates AMD's Turion 64 x 2 dual-core 1.2GHz as a main chipset and ATI RS690E for its graphics card. The device runs on Microsoft's Windows XP and is capable of the new Windows 7 operating system.

Samer Suhail, Nawaiya MD, says that in the future, the company will introduce many convergence handheld devices with full PC and 3G capabilities that would support their main service of providing mobile content.

According to ABI Research, the global number of 300 million unique visitors to Internet mapping sites is expected to grow at an annual rate of 15% in the coming years, despite the growth of portable navigation devices, says Mundo Geo.

In the US, MapQuest, with more than 40 million visitors per month, and Google are engaged in a fierce battle for market leadership, leaving Yahoo Maps and Microsoft Live Search Maps far behind them.

ABI Research says the fixed-mobile convergence trend will continue to drive the integration between mobile and desktop mapping for applications such as social networking and advertising. At the same time the boundaries between fixed and mobile computing systems are blurring.

While Intel's Atom will hold more than an 80% share of the 21.5 million netbooks sold in 2009, a movement is underway that will enable the ARM processor to gain a 55% market share in 2012, says CIOL.

"ARM processors, not Intel's Atom, will benefit from the current technology-economic cycle,” says Dr Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network. "We see two technology factors converging with the poor macroeconomic situation that will create a market for ARM: the release of the Cortex-9 microarchitecture and the emergence of cloud computing.”

According to Castellano, as cloud computing becomes more sophisticated, there will be an Internet protocol-based convergence of audio, video, productivity applications, and IT data run on ARM-based netbooks.