Linux Vs. ... Google, Sort Of

An odd headline, I'm sure, but that's the latest wave of insight from the pundits with an eye turned to the Linux-powered netbook world. It isn't a Windows vs. Linux race; it's a Linux vs. Linux race.

Netbooks, or so the conventional thinking goes, are traditional notebooks writ small. The new line of thought stands this insight on its head: netbooks are phones writ large. To that end, you don't need to take a full-blown laptop OS and slim it down -- you take something designed for devices that have wildly variable capacities and screen sizes and build up from there. So long Ubuntu and maybe Moblin, too; say hey, Google Android.

What's lacking so far is the kind of extended real-world shakedown that would make such a proposition a little more credible. People have booted Android on netbook hardware and it's run there, but that's not the same as having an Android installation that's specifically tuned for netbooks. Nor is it the same as marketing such a device, etc. -- something that's easy to forget when it feels like all software is only an .ISO away from being used by you. (Too bad about everyone else.)

And then there's the specter of Windows 7 looming over the whole picture, which might well confound the whole thing all the more, prices be darned -- at least until the predominant users of such devices are people who have an attachment to no particular application or file format. Those are the folks more comfortable with a sized-up phone than they are with a sized-down notebook, and they're the audience to woo most aggressively with an Android netbook design.

Will it work? To get an idea of that, we'd need to see an honest-to-goodness Android-powered netbook first. Any takers?

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