Posted by Randy Cooper | Posted in Rumor/Speculation | Posted on 02-01-2009
While Windows may be more popular than Linux when it comes to netbooks for a variety of reasons, price certainly isn’t one of them. We don’t know whether it’s peoples’ fear of the unknown or just the awful UI facades typically used to hide the open-source alternative, but a lot of people are hoping that Android could sweep in and offer a third choice — someday. Not content to wait, a couple of freelancers at VentureBeat (who also run a startup called Mobile-facts) spent a few hours tweaking Google’s (Linux-based) OS to run on ASUS hardware and, thanks to the availability of open-source drivers for all the wee thing’s wee devices, were up and running in no time. Mind you, the giant buttons and simplistic UI seem more suited to a G1 than an S10, but it surely wouldn’t take long to fix that. So, the only question now is when will a manufacturer step up and announce Android out of the box? There’s a little electronics show coming up soon, so maybe we’ll hear more there.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/02/android-installed-and-running-on-an-eee-pc-in-a-matter-of-hours/
I see Android for Notebooks as a good opportunity but still one that needs to mature. The fact that Android doesn’t use X-server but a framebuffer-device, have its own advantages, but also many disadvantages: 1. It’s painfully slow, because it needs hardware specific drivers for 2D and 3D acceleration. 2. Most of Linux applications rely on X-server. This means that these cannot be immediately be ported to Android. This may not be a huge problem per se, but definitively if one has to compare what Android + Google Apps can do as compared to a modern Linux distro, you can see that Android has still a long way ahead…