Asus’ Android Eee PC needs more development time
June 17, 2009 at 4:34 pm
At the Computex show in Taiwan a few weeks back, an Asus Eee PC was snapped powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and running Android. What was interesting is that this Eee PC was demonstrated on the Qualcomm stand and no similar demo was made by Asus. We now have word as to why that was.
Jonney Shih, Asus Chairman, said that Asus had originally planned to showcase an Android-based Eee PC at Computex, but their feeling was that it still needed more work. Asus felt that more development time was needed with Android to make the most out of the netbook experience.
He also confirmed that, right now, there is no timeline as to when they will start to put an Android Eee PC netbook into mass-production. In the past, Asus has said that no Android products will be released before Q1 2010 and I doubt much has changed there.
Shih was speaking at a shareholder meeting and also said that he expects the launch of Windows 7 in October to boost sales. I imagine Asus are lining up a number of models for the new OS, but so far details are thin on the ground. What is likely, however, is a multi-touch capable Eee PC T91 that was shown off at Computex.
Via Digitimes.
June 17th, 2009 8:48 PM
I think Acer’s strategy is a good one: Dual-boot Android & Windows. If you want/need to use Windows, you can. Otherwise, Android offers you the benefits of fast boot & runtime, super long battery life, touch-optimized UI, location-based services, cell phone calls, SMS/MMS, multi-media playback, and access to all the other cool apps in the Android Market. Plus, Android supports OTA updates, so as Android-on-netbook improvements are made, they can be pushed out to netbook owners.
A similar approach could be used on smartbooks, with Ubuntu instead of Windows (since Windows does not run on ARM). This would be awesome! You would run Android most of the time, but if you need OpenOffice, or any other Ubuntu-supported app (developers could even run Linux dev tools!), you could launch them.
My vote is for this Android dual-boot configuration to be standard on all netbooks…perhaps with Windows/Ubuntu as optional add-ons.