• Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, December 30, 2009 10:25 AM

At least for this morning's class, boys and girls, we're going to put aside all the rampant speculation about what Apple has up its sleeve with a product that may or may not be the "TabletMac" that may or may not be announced this quarter (see here and here to review), and let Don Clark guide us through a new breed of devices called the "smartbook." They are due to debut next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Smartbooks, which are designed to be continually connected to the Internet via 3G cellular networks, are expected to carry lower prices than netbooks, which run as low as $250. And many are likely to be sold at subsidized prices, along with data plans, by cellular carriers.

But companies that offer both netbooks and smartbooks, which won't run programs like Microsoft Word, face a particularly tricky marketing effort, Clark reports. "It's too big to be a phone and too small for easy content creation," says Roger Kay, a market researcher with Endpoint Technologies Associates. "There has been little evidence that people really like that category."

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