Earlier this year, Freescale announced it would enter the netbook market with its own set of chips based on the ARM architecture, claiming they would yield better battery life than the Atom-based netbooks of today. The company gave a little more info today, and among other things, they want to support Google’s Android on their netbooks.
Freescale is clearly aiming for a market below the current netbooks, and they are striving for a price point of less than 200 USD, maybe even 100 USD. Their target market is young users in the west, and their netbooks will only provide Wi-Fi connectivity. “For price reasons, the netbooks are going to primarily be shipped with just Wi-Fi. For mobile professional users, you do need 3G connectivity,” Glen Burchers, marketing director for Freescale’s consumer business, said.
Apart from Android, Freescale will also support Xandros Linux and the Phoenix Technologies’ HyperSpace. Freescale believes that the netbook market will rise to 30 million units this year, and that ARM can eventually make up half of that. The focus of the company is currently on developed markets. “I think for developed countries you’ll see good, better and best,” Burchers explained, “I believe the good and better will be based on ARM. I believe the best will be Atom-based and will still run Windows, because you can do more with it.”
The success of the ARM-based netbook will depend on how customers perceive these machines. ARM netbook manufacturers, who will all ship their devices with Linux, will need to market their netbooks not as ordinary laptops, but as device closer to phones. If customers perceive these machines as ordinary (but small) laptops, a lot of them will wonder why they don’t come with Windows. Market them as a sort of special device, and people will much more readily accept that they do not run Windows (see mobile phones).
Still, capturing half of the netbook market seems a bit of a stretch. With Intel, AMD, and Via already in the game, it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a chance for Freescale. In any case, the first ARM-based netbooks will appear on the market during the summer of 2009.
At last. Hopefully RAM and SSD are upgradeable in their models.
Hopefully they’ll improve on the MID profile of Android. The phone profile is getting all the glory and the MID profile is quite out of date from what I’ve read (NITDroid switched to the MID profile and lots of things that worked in the Phone profile were suddently broken..)
Why don’t they use Eeebuntu Netbook Remix instead of Android?
(All they need is some sort of instant-on added for Firefox — start Firefox first whilst then the rest of the OS is starting up)
It does seem sorta weird. They have a resource-constrained platform… and decide to run the whole thing under “Not-Really-Quite-Java-OS”.
Well, Android runs on much less powerful devices, so it should work just fine on these ARM netbooks.
Then again, why you’d want an ARM-based netbook when you can just as easily get a full-featured x86 one remains a bit if a puzzle for me. Sure, as a geek I’d love to have one of these to play with and I hope they succeed, but as a normal customer? I fail to see the benefit in buying into a platform that runs less software. With x86 making strides in power usage as well, the relevance seems to dwindle a bit for ARM-based netbooks.
That’s a very reasonable point. And I figured it would be pointed out to me. (I started to include it as an aside in my previous post, but decided it might be more enlightening for someone to point it out, possibly including extra details.) But it seems like it would be even a poorer match for the less powerful devices. Maybe if I had hands-on experience with an Android device something that I am missing now would become clear to me. I hope there is more to Android than just the Aura of the “Big G”.
P.S. I like your new avatar, BTW.
Edited 2009-02-17 11:43 UTC
Quoting from the original article:
“claiming they would yield better battery life than the Atom-based netbooks of today”
There’s your answer. As long as they can beat the Atom based notebooks in power usage by a significant enough margin then I’m interested. Of course if they can’t I’ll agree it’s kind of pointless.
Isn’t that the claim that didn’t work for Transmeta? Suddenly, it was “common wisdom” that it was the display and not the processor which was the major determinant of battery life. (I wonder who started that rumor?)
Transmeta was bought out before Atom was ever released. Tramsmeta only really competed with VIA anyways.
The ARM runs linux and linux runs Android. Which application can you run on Android that can’t run on ARM?
Moreover, the ARM is much more power efficient than the x86. You’re not going to play the latest 3D games on those device anyway. If you wanted to, you would not buy a netbook but something bigger. netbooks are netbooks, they’re not desktops. They’re small and they run longer.
Well it’s all about battery life. The ARM powered devices have a much better battery life than atoms. They are much more suited to this kind of device.
And in this market a ARM device running linux (even though were talking andriod here) would not really be lacking much software. Most linux software runs on the ARM platform.
Edited 2009-02-17 22:46 UTC
Battery power and efficiency? Having more time to use a laptop, and especially a netbook, is always a good thing. IMO, their batteries still die too quickly. From what I understand, the ARM is just much cleaner and more efficient; it doesn’t *need* all the tweaking x86 does to perform well with limited power.
I would say there’s only “less software supported” if you’re locked into x86 binary-only software in the first place (ie. you use Windows and a lot of proprietary software, and for whatever decide to run it on a netbook). I honestly don’t know why you’d want a full-fledged Windows desktop on a machine whose purpose is *not* to be a full desktop PC, but if that’s what someone wants there’s always the Intel Atom models.
Also, there’s still a lot of open source software that can run on an ARM processor… just about anything that runs currently on x86 and has its source available can be ported (if it’s not already). It’s only binary stuff like VMware (I seriously hope no one expects to run that on a netbook…), Opera, Flash and similar programs that would cause a problem, and it’s up to their makers to release an ARM version of their programs. Opera is good, I have faith in them to release an ARM version if it ever takes off, but who knows about Adobe.
Competition is good. I want to see more alternatives available. As it is now, in most cases, it’s x86… 32-bit or (increasingly) 64-bit or… well, nothing. It won’t hurt to have an ARM version to choose from. Again, there’s always the Atom if you really want Windows that bad.
ARM based netbooks should be much cheaper in high volumes. Longer battery life with cheaper & lighter battery (and no fans) will be a big deal as well.
x86 netbooks are not so much more “full featured” than arm based ones if you are going be using Linux anyway and don’t care too much about being able to run Wine. Open Source in general benefits greatly from a big installed base of non-x86 devices with a general purpose OS. I’m not sure I see the point of Android here though – the whole point of Android was to bring an open platform to phones (which didn’t exist previously). With netbooks, we already have several open platforms to choose from.
Seriously, about the only thing you’d be missing out on aside from Wine with a non-x86 netbook is the majority of flash content, and probably Silverlight as well (at least at first, though moonlight/Mono could be ported). Gnash and Swfdec can handle some of it, but there are still quite a few pages they will not handle. Of course, depending on your point of view, that might not be a bad thing at all, given how over-used flash content can be.
Wow, there’s so many good things appearing on Linux landscape and these guys continue to support crapware like Xandros??
You all act like an ARM processor is not a “real” processor. Don’t forget the i-phone runs a version of OSX on an ARM processor (not a very fast one at that). Debian has a version designed to run on ARM processors and it has just been updated. A multi-core ARM was just announced that will kick Atom’s butt and still use much less power. Why limit yourself to a phone OS when you can run a full OS on a powerful chip that is capable of smoothly running 1080p video?
I fail to see why Android can’t be a full OS
Cortex a9 is not to go live until 2010. Cortex A8 first started shipping early 2007. That’s a 3 year release cycle.
Atom came out last summer and they’re soon to release generation 2. Nine month release cycle.
So which atom will vapor Cortex A9 thrash?
Just bringing in reality…if ARM doesn’t change their way of doing business — fast — they won’t have a market and Cortex A9 is probably too late for netbooks.
Android might be interesting. However it’s an unknown. Open source programming has never adopted java for the desktop so they won’t appeal to those developers.
I’m guessing current android development is phone oriented only. This won’t help provide an android netbook with much appealing software.
No, the apps I’ve written for the G1 won’t scale well to higher resolutions. Though I guess you could always run phone based apps in a phone sized window.
capable?
http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/java/jazelle.html
Give me a substitute on x86?
Well, Android doesn’t use it (and given the design of Dalvik it never will), so what?
why not enter the market with a PPC (power PC) proc instead of arm? they have PPC procesors that are amazing with power consumption, and I mean amazing. (list here) http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage.jsp?nodeId=016246…
But I guess since so many things run on ARM as it is (in the mebeded world) it was just a better choice for them, still in my geeky dream it would have been PPC
and yes i am ignoring the fact android does not run on PPC. but hell, use linux, or even Darwin as a base. Darwin ran PPC for a longggggg time. ( http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ )
Edited 2009-02-17 20:31 UTC
I hope Android wouldn’t be forced upon us. Hopefully they will not embed it in a rom chip and will allow us to put the ARM operating system of our own choice on it, no matter what it might be. I’d prefer an ARM version of Linux myself, rather than Android (yeah, I know Android is Linux-based, but still).
I agree. I myself would love to build a system from scratch using an ARM version of Debian as base, and choosing what I need.
I myself am waiting for this particular model. Why? I only mostly want a netbook for light web surfing, mobile writing, and/or chat. And I don’t want and don’t need some high tech 300 or 400 dollar device. It’s overkill for what I want. This netbook, at a <200 USD price point, is extremely attractive to me, especially since I use Linux anyways.
Is Android code available? Why isn’t there a Android distro that would allow the rest of us (me) to see what it is all about.
Maybe the Android desktop is fast on a desktop PC.
Yes, the Android code is available. The reason why there isn’t an Android distribution you can try, is because it runs on ARM-based processors, not on x86 processors. Unless you typed that message on an Acorn Archimedes, you’ve got no hope of running Android on your current desktop computer 🙂 (even then, an Archimedes wouldn’t run Android).
Well, there is an Android development environment using QEMU, that’s available for Linux on x86.