What’s the point of smartphone OS’s on Netbooks?
- 2009-05-07
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- laptops rant smartphones
Ok, so, let’s forget the fact that I think netbooks are a temporary fad to be replaced by smarter smartphones and cheaper/lighter fullsize laptops. Recently I’ve seen a lot of talk about smartphone OS’s showing up on netbooks – Android on a netbook, an iPhone tablet and even the resurrection of the Foleo running WebOS. At a high level it seems to make sense, these are OS’s designed for limited hardware – netbooks have limited hardware – boom, match made in heaven, right?
Slow your roll, young man. I’m not really sure – I mean, I know what the OS vendors get, much more platform exposure which is, theoretically good. Although, given the disparity in hardware I wonder how much the platform actually gets from this exposure. But beyond that what good does it do the consumer as compared to a netbook running XP, Windows 7, Linux or OSX? I’m not clear that it does anything better.
The hardware running a netbook is significantly more powerful than the hardware running a smartphone – it is much closer to a fullsize laptop than it is to a phone. The screen is way larger, a full on (if a bit more cramped) touch typeable keyboard and a full on pointing device make it much easier on the physical interface side than the tiny confines of a handheld device. Second, a real amount of RAM measured in gigabyte(s) (as opposed to say the 128 megabytes found on the iPhone) is enough to run a real operating system and many full size applications (well, ok, not enough to run Vista, but XP and Windows 7 are reputed to run just fine).
The CPU’s are typically in between a phone and a regular computer. But, typically enough to run full size apps – maybe not the most speedy and maybe not a few at a time, but enough to run them nevertheless. Throw in a much larger hard drive and pow – you have an animal much closer in capabilities and interface to a laptop than a phone.
Sure, the user interface of a phone is designed for the smaller screen – but it’s designed for a tiny screen. Will it scale up and all the apps scale up to work normally on an arbitrarily large 7″-10″ screen? I’m not so sure. This disparity (along with the difference in input types and touch screen and memory and etc….) makes me wonder if mobile OS on netbooks even does wonders for the platform as people have to start making hardware specific(er) versions of their software?
The app stores certainly make it simpler to find and install apps. But there are much fewer apps available to smartphones and where they overlap functionality, you typically get much less functionality in the smartphone version than the full os’s version. Plus, I’d love to see app stores for the full OS’s, too. I don’t know why this is taking so long – people want that.
Recently I was busy making fun of Howard’s hackintosh dell mini 9 (possibly out of jealousy…) and wondering why he wouldn’t just be using his iPhone – he noted that if he needed to he could run Photoshop and edit video and etc… Well, yeah. Plus one could run full word or excel – not some half system with crappy compatibility.
So really, what does the user get with a smartphone OS instead of a full blown OS? A nicer launcher, I guess, but one could customize a full blown OS with a top level interface I guess more suited to a smaller screen? Or not. App Store – certainly cooler and easier access to apps, but apps designed for a screen a small fraction of the size of the netbook and with reduced functionality. I guess you could throw in a much smaller CPU which might give you some power savings – but the power savings in the CPU probably doesn’t actually net you much in battery life given the large screen and big drive. Maybe it lets you shave off some cost? But enough to really make a difference? I’m not convinced. I must be missing something, someone help me out.
