

Acer to start selling netbooks running Android - seldo
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSTP18980620090602

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noss
Idle observation: The argument that avoiding Windows would lower the cost
since there is no license cost to pay Microsoft seems flawed in practice. The
psychology does not work in favour of it.

It would be interesting to instead see a strategy where it costs more just
because it is not an old boring Windows system, but a cool modern Android
system on it. Actually charge the customer slightly more. Signal that "this is
value added, it is the premium version".

Of course, then Android needs to meet those expectations and be awesome.

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ZeroGravitas
And this shouldn't be hard because Microsoft enforces maximum specs on the XP
machines leaving a gap in the market for "top-end netbooks" which people seem
to think is an oxymoron.

I'm very much in the market for an ARM-based, linux netbook with a Pixel Qi
screen. I think it would blow the Kindle out the water as an e-book reader
(hardware-wise, access to content not so much).

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adatta02
Hmm things will get interesting if the Android netbook distribution is closely
compatible (or totally) with the phone version.

If you can easily run apps built for phones on a netbook and vice versa then
I'd totally whip out Eclipse and start hammering out cheap Android apps. The
problem will be if this fragments the Android SDK to a point where end user's
cant tell if the application is going to work correctly on their device.

And of course another blow to Linux on the desktop because here is another
platform to help you avoid the perils of the Linux GUI.

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ZeroGravitas
This is not a blow to "Linux" on the desktop or netbook, quite the reverse.
While I don't fully understand it's appeal it's a fact that to get Android
running with wireless/suspend and all the other fiddly bits you've got to get
the lower levels of "Linux" on the hardware. That's all GPL so voila,
Gnome/KDE or whatever is pretty much ready to roll.

Hardware support is _the_ problem. If they're fixing that while chasing some
Android buzz then I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

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ianbishop
I say this somewhat blindly, as I have not spent much time with the Android
code base, but trying to scale an operating system from mobile phone to
netbook seems a tad ambitious, no?

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smhinsey
I think the OS itself was built with this in mind, so the default apps are
probably fine. The real question is going to be the 3d party apps. I know
apple is already having to deal with this to some extent with some of the
resolution independence features in 3.0, but I'm not sure what google's plan
is.

