We’ve been talking a lot about ARM-based netbooks, and when they’re going to come. We’ve also been talking about Android on netbooks. Well, at Computex, analyst firm Gartner took a look at ARM netbooks running Android, compared them with Atom notebooks running Windows 7, and concluded that the interface on the former felt snappier.
Android is of course a phone operating system, but there are many efforts underway to get to work properly on devices with larger screens, such as netbooks. While Android works on Atom netbooks as well, it was mostly found on ARM devices at Computex, and Gartner concluded that not only did those perform faster than Windows 7/Atom netbooks, but Android is also backed by a strong brand, Google.
It’s important to note that Android on these devices is still a while off, 3-to-4 quarters, Gartner states. Still, the few ARM netbooks that did work properly with Android showed a lot of promise. “When Android did work, we found that the user interface was very snappy on relatively low-performance ARM processors, more so than Windows 7 on Atom,” Christian Heidarson and Ben Lee, analysts at Gartner, said.
ARM wasn’t the only one making an appearance at Computex, though. Yes, Android has even been ported to MIPS. MIPS Techologies and Embedded Alley worked together on the port, and had MIPS devices at Computex to show off.
Together with NVIDIA’s impressive Tegra platform, it seems like alternative platforms are poised to make a comeback – Windows or no. Exciting times ahead, that’s for sure.
Those are the three things a real netBOOK needs.
But so far nobody has a ticket for the clue train.
Pixel Qi says they don’t plan touchscreens
Netbook makers don’t plan touchscreens ( only that french dude )
_I_ want a netbook that I can use all day in the sun without worrying about the battery. Arm and Pixel Qi have the tech for that. We just needs enlightened OEMs, but I don’t think the Asians get what people want.
I think the Asians probably think netbooks are about price, but it really isn’t. It’s about form(factor) and function. I wouldn’t mind paying more.
And touchscreen is possible one of those things I want.
Edited 2009-06-15 23:22 UTC
majority of netbook are similar…
netbooks are of course about the prize too… (specially in 3rd world countries, or even non-rich families in the 1st world countries too. Sometimes as secondary/girlfriend/kid machine… you get it.) The question really is, does the public who REALLY want’s it for the form factor really matter in the economics point of view?
The manufacturers think they don’t right now… TechCrunch (or any other similar product) netbook/webtablet may change the manufacturer’s point of view, like the original EeePC changed their minds about the demand of netbooks.
Perhaps this is what you’re looking for: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm
They still don’t seem to have a solid ship date, but it looks like a neat device.
Asus already has launched the Eee T91. Out this week in the US.
MSI has a touchscreen Wind coming out, if it’s not out already.
Intel has the touchscreen Classmate Convertible..
Acer is coming out with one this year too.
All Atom based netbooks, but there’s been reports of Arm based netbooks coming out too.
I agree too, whats the point in using it outside if you cant see the freaking screen. so you say they already have these out now? I seen an article dated in jan where LG made a sunlight readable lcd.
copairing android to Win 7 isn’t really fair. If you want to make a comparison Android should be compaired to WinCE 6.5. And if you compair a desktop like version of android to a desktop like version of WinCE (in a desktop shell optemized for that purpose, NOT the WinMobile incarnation) then its a fair comparison. When I was testing Android for that purpose a few months ago agianst WinCE 6.1 I found WinCE considerable snappier. Android has made a few more releases since then so I sould go back and redo my tests now against WinCE 6.5 and the newest version of Android.
I will agree though, android did seem faster than windows 7 on Atom processors. But Windows 7 has a lot more going on than android does, it’s not a good comparison.
Of note, QNX 6.4.0 and 6.4.1 also seemed snappier than Android on the same hardware. Infact QNX was even snappier than WinCE, though it was pretty close over all.
:Edit: on a bit of a tangent, if you want to see a really great piece of equiptment that is in the same leages as where android is shooting then take a look at this, it’s so awsome http://www.mintpass.com/product/p_mp100_conc.asp
:Edit 2: tests were’re done on a new Beagle Board: http://beagleboard.org/
Edited 2009-06-15 23:25 UTC
“If you want to make a comparison Android should be compaired (sic) to WinCE 6.5.”
Don’t be silly. Microsoft won’t sell WinCE on ARM as a netbook operating system – they’re pushing Win 7 on Atom. WinCE is a niche player in the cell phone market, nothing more.
The question is whether a $100 ARM smartbook running Android is snappier than a $500 Atom netbook running Win 7. The answer is, “Yes!”.
Well, NVIDIA did use WinCE on its Tegra netbooks during Computex, including an NVIDIA-built interface, so I wouldn’t be so sure of that.
I checked several announcements (including Engadget) and saw no indication that Microsoft is *pushing* WinCE for smartbooks – indeed, they seem to want to kill the entire “low cost portable” market so they can get back to the high-end laptop market they dominate so profitably.
But thanks (honestly) for pointing out the lone WinCE smartbook. I had missed the announcement amongst the flood of Android announcements, and wasn’t even aware anyone had even tried. If smartbooks take off as much as so many expect, I would guess Microsoft will *want* to push WinCE, just as they backtracked on killing XP when Linux netbooks exploded and Vista proved unsuitable.
We live in interesting times. Thanks for making them more interesting for me. 🙂
MS, at current, has no real plans to push WinCE on netbooks. However, there are a few OEM’s that will be doing so. For now they will remain nameless, but you can be sure I will post something when it happens.
personally I hope android adopts a file system like this (or this file system, it rocks so hard) http://www.datalight.com/companyinfo/news.php?newsid=69&newscat=1
I’m actually playing with Android SDK right now… I have had to ditch my 15 years of C++ and finally bow down to learning Java, and it has not been THAT bad a transition at all.
Why do this?… because I believe the market place is better for smaller devices then desktops now days..
I can get Android up and going on my desktop for FREE, while to do iPhone development I am forced to go and buy an Apple Mac… Thats a huge PLUS for alot of people especially in todays economic climate.
I think Android has a very real future looking at all the phone and netbook makers who are getting in to it.. It will possibly be the biggest thorn in Microsofts side for along time.
Once I get an Android phone, I’ll probably take the Java plunge too. I like iPhone(and Cocoa in general) development, but I just can’t do the single vendor lockin thing, and I won’t get a Mac. Maybe if I could get OS X Legally one of my existing machines, I would do both, but the iPhone just isn’t worth it. I currently have and E71, and looked into navtive Symbian development, but after one weekend I downloaded the Android SDK.
How about Android on phone? You know, its intended platform? Really don’t care for Android on a netbook, laptop, pc, whatever. How about getting it on more phones and gettignmore developers involved and actually make the apps store relevant? I thought Android was supposed to be competition for the iphone? So far they are getting their asses kicked by a large margin.
The only thing I’m getting so far is Android couldn’t really compete in the smartphone market so lets port it to everything else.
What kind of software can we run with the Android OS? Do we have access to the same software that Linux can run? How about OpenOffice? Firefox? You know, something usefull for a Netbook.
You may not need a word processor or spreadsheet on a cell phone, but on a Netbook, those a quite usefull on the road.
Edited 2009-06-16 01:34 UTC
FELT is very subjective – I bet I could reverse that ‘feeling’ in a matter of seconds by turning off 90% of the goofy fade-in and slide-in effects.
Agreed – and many times when I hear people say, “oh, this is slower’, it has nothing to do with speed and everything to do with the end user assuming that the ‘fade in’ and ‘fade out’ as equalling slow (which explains the ‘fade in’ and ‘fade out’).
I’ve run Windows 7 on this netbook and compared it to Fedora 11, and the ‘speed’ is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things. I find that Windows 7 is slightly more snappy than Fedora 11 but Windows 7 uses a heck of a lot more memory on a clean installation (around 500mb). The slowness only really starts to show itself once you open many applications and the swap starts getting thrashed.
I do find it funny they compared Android; an incredibly limited operating system to Windows 7 which is a general purpose operating system that has none of the limitations of Android. I’m definately going to upgrade to Snow Leopard for my two Mac’s but I’m still umming and arring over what I’ll have on my netbook.
Edited 2009-06-16 04:13 UTC
It’s also possible for ARM based netbook to run Windows apps if it comes with rdesktop client and Thin Client Server such as ThinServer
http://www.rdesktop.org
http://www.aikotech.com/thinserver.htm
MIPS – yes new. ARM.. um.. what do you think it was running on in the first place? ARM phone/MID to ARM “netbook” is a *very* small hop.
Where do I state that it is?
What did he mean by “When Android did work…”?
Will the Netbook port be officially supported by Google? In the Android developer forums, it seems like Google did not want to support more than one developer phone because of resource and cost issues. Would be interesting to findout how much the Marketplace will support it. otherwise it would be just another Linux netbook with a modified JVM on it.