Freescale said Monday it would offer an ARM-based chip that could lead to a $200 Linux-based netbook, offering about twice the amount of usage on a single battery charge as Intel’s Atom processor allows. Freescale’s efforts are nothing new (only AMD has so far stayed above the netbook fray), but it did get me thinking about how Intel’s endless pushing of netbooks has, ironically, helped destroy the hegemony of x86 machines for personal computing.

Instead of being stuck with an x86 chip from Intel or AMD powering your computer, in the coming year you’ll see everything from netbooks to mobile internet devices running on ARM processors. Other machines will offload more processing to the graphics processor. This is great for consumers, who will soon be able to choose a computer that fits their lifestyle, much like a car buyer chooses between a minivan or sports car. Categories will likely evolve around the type of computing jobs someone plans for the machine, input devices, mobility and power requirements.

Our colleagues over at jkOnTheRun don’t believe smartphones are computers, but they’re discounting the fact that computing has moved beyond word processing and spreadsheets to encompass everything from social networking to commerce. As a reporter who spends her days typing more than 2,000 words, I love my full-size keyboard, but there are plenty of people who can survive using phones to access Twitter and their banking software. In the developing world, mobile phones are being used for everything from web access to setting pricing for their livestock. Computing has broadened far beyond the cubicle culture.

I only need to watch my dad, an electrical engineer, manipulate circuits in a CAD-style design program with his mouse all day to realize that a touchscreen device with intensive graphics processing power might be a better tool for his work. Freed from the x86 instruction set, it’s possible that computing in the coming years could become less of a one-size-fits all model and more personalized, while the use of other common processors such as GPUs or ARM-based chips can allow personalization without huge increases in the price of a gadget. The key will be fitting the pieces together in cost-effective products, and making sure users know exactly what their personalized machines can and cannot do.

In addition to more transparent marketing, there needs to be a focus on other input methods such as speech or even gestures, as well as a change in the way software is developed. Software companies have to port their programs to a variety of processors to keep up with the expansion of heterogeneous computing. Witness Adobe’s efforts to get Flash released on PCs (x 86 chips) and mobiles (ARM architecture) at the same time. And Adobe has to address embedded efforts too, especially since electronics makers want to turn the TV into a web-connected device.

So, while chips such as those from Freescale may not end up in a consumer netbook, they could find a home powering a low-cost tablet for inventory managment. Instead of focusing on the ever-shifting definition of netbooks, perhaps we should be thinking about ways computing should and will change to fit our lives.

For what seems to be an eternity, we have been promised seamless connectivity, high-speed connections that appear auto-magically out of thin air, giving us access to the wonders of the web — and of course, our data, including the unending stream of emails. Today, we have 3G networks, Wi-Fi in coffee shops and our homes, connections in office, trains and in some cases, even in planes. You would think that we are almost always connected.

And yet we have a growing number of companies — many of them with vested interest in the desktop PC paradigm — that are convinced we need to have a hybrid strategy when it comes to applications.

Adobe Systems (ADBE) is about to officially announce its desktop-webtop hybrid technology AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and related products for making rich Internet applications. Others have similar ambitions. Mozilla with its Prism initiative, Google’s Gears, Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX and Microsoft are trying to come up with ways in which our data lives in the cloud but is available on the desktop, aka locally.

I, for one, have been in this hybrid camp because it is hard to predict when we will have ubiquitous broadband. I first wrote about this trend back in March 2007 for Business 2.0 and pointed out that “the ability to work offline is crucial to overcoming consumer resistance to Web-based applications. The new offline mode will doubtless help with the adoption of many Web-based applications that are debuting right now.”

In December 2007, Anne Zelenka reminded us that despite all the hoopla, the initial attempts at hybrid apps didn’t prove to be all that compelling. Many of our readers felt that the hybrid applications need to present a new kind of value proposition that goes beyond offline access to all the familiar web apps.

Hopefully we will see some of them soon enough.

Related Posts:

• Desktop Apps, reborn as hybrids
• Not Hot, Offline Web Applications.
• The Coming Apollo vs Firefox Battle.
• Why Google needs the desktop (& Adobe)
• Google buy Adobe

Anssi Vanjoki, EVP of multimedia at Nokia, unveiled the handset manufacturer’s gorgeous N810 handset at the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. I got a chance to play with it shortly afterwards, and I can tell you that it lives up to much of its promise.

But what struck me during Vanjoki’s presentation was the realization that the N810 was the third of five in this product line that Nokia is in the process of releasing over several years. The first, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, was launched in May of 2005. It was targeted at “named super geeks;” the company’s goal was to sell a mere two thousand of them to specific users. The sequel, the N800, was launched in January of this year and was targeted at a somewhat broader geek segment — “prosumers” who are early adopters.

According to Tom Dunmore of Stuff.tv, around 300,000 of the earlier models were sold (surpassing the company’s projections.) But to hear Vanjoki tell it, selling units wasn’t the point.

North American product releases tend to be driven by competitive urgency — ship now, lest someone else scoop us with theirs. But Nokia’s N810 launch is one step in a longer plan. My impression of Vanjoki’s presentation was that this long view is at the core of Nokia’s strategy. And it’s driven by two key assumptions: That the handset will be the world’s Internet platform, and that it will be open.

In North America, we tend to have a distorted view of connectivity. We associate Internet access with desktops. We each (most of us, anyway) have one cell phone, locked to a carrier.

Not so in the rest of the world. Infonetics estimates that 47 percent of all mobile subscribers come from the Asia Pacific region, 36 percent from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and only 9 percent from North America. Nokia alone will ship 400 million handsets this year, and most of those devices can surf the web. Geography, power consumption, and lack of wired infrastructure mean that much of the planet will see its first web page on a portable handset. Not only will Internet handsets be everywhere, they’ll be open.

Any discussion of Internet handsets must include Apple’s (AAPL) equally stunning iPhone. Apple has launched a “features” phone rather than an Internet client platform. The iPhone’s menu is reminiscent of the old Compuserve dashboard, which let subscribers choose a carefully limited number of applications. Only Compuserve could dictate what applications a user could run, which gave it fast growth and good control early on.

To be sure, both the iPhone and the N810 are phenomenal pieces of engineering. But Apple is actively trying to restrict what runs on the application in an arms race of unlocking, software updates, and bricking. This has forced many firms (Skype, Webot) to get “applications” on the iPhone through the Safari browser.

Contrast this war with Nokia’s handset, which is based on Linux. Nokia is building a platform that can run arbitrary software. It’ll be messy, and will go through several iterations. But in the end, we know how this story plays out: iPhone is Compuserve; Nokia is the Internet. (Google’s (GOOG) much-speculated mobile device is also rumored to run a pared-down Linux.)

Other companies have proven that this long view rewards the patient. Adobe’s (ADBE) Bruce Chizen, commended for the company’s excellent software quality, says he won’t release software until it’s ready. Games developer Blizzard has delivered installments of its Warcraft and Starcraft franchises years later than originally planned, as has Valve for its Half-Life series.

But Nokia’s view is even longer. It has spent huge amounts of money developing these handsets, and it may take years for them to make that back. But they don’t expect a short win — and the long-term rewards of openness and mobility will make it worth the wait.

Everyone wants a piece of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Office suite. Google (GOOG), Sun Microsystems (JAVA), IBM (IBM), dozens of start-ups and now, Adobe Systems (ADBE). The company today bought Virtual Ubiquity, a Waltham, Mass.-based start-up behind Buzzword, an online word processing software offering. I guess this is one way to respond to Microsoft Silverlight that takes aim right at the heart of Adobe.

Buzzword is the right moniker: the product is getting a lot of buzz because it has all the right words in its “game plan.” Never mind, there isn’t many people who have actually used this product? (Liz gave them a great review when they launched, but still not clear how the start-up did in terms of sign-ups and users.) How this start-up fits into Adobe’s game plan, or how it adds to their bottom line, isn’t quite clear.

That’s not important! What’s important is to play the “give an Office wannabe away for free” game. Everyone, of course is slugging it out with, everyone of course. No one really wants to talk about how many people are actually using these online offerings.

Adobe also released a new document sharing product called Share, which used Flash to share documents. You can embed the shared “document” in any web page, much like Scribd. This Share application is bound to temper some of the hype around document sharing start-ups.

Microsoft’s response? It has come up with a new offering called Office Live Workspace targeting the consumers and small business owners. Mary Jo Foley explains that this is not a hosted Office suite. It is an extension to desktop based Office and will work with Office Wannabes like OpenOffice and StarOffice.

While Google’s (GOOG) YouTube continues to gain market share and increase its lead in the Web video market, funding to its competitors continues to flow unabated. Yesterday, Dailymotion raised $34 million, following on the heels of Veoh ($26 million) and MetaCafe ($30 million.)

These three companies alone have raised a total of $125 million — a stupendous amount of money considering that they don’t even figure among the top ten video destination sites.

The future for these companies is unclear, but that level of investment indicates that they may have no option but to become standalone businesses. In the meantime, the number of likely buyers is slowly decreasing. For now, NBC and Fox, who are backing Hulu ( $100 million), don’t seem to care too much, and Yahoo (YHOO) has its hands full. Microsoft (MSFT) isn’t going to be interested because all three of the video sites use rival Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash technology. A European media or telecom company could be a buyer, but I can’t think of any right now.

The lure of video advertising (something even YouTube is trying to figure out) is too strong for investors to resist. I think online video advertising is a bit of a chimera. The big challenge for all online video destinations is the ever-present threat of lawsuits for infringing content. Every lawsuit drains resources (and cash reserves), as Veoh is about to found out. Regardless, the battle for the tenth spot should be an interesting one. Time to pop the popcorn.