Netbooks turn into Androids

Analyst firm Ovum has predicted that Android, the Google-led open source mobile OS, will appear on Netbooks before too long. It's hardly the most incisive of predictions (and it's been made before) -- most netbooks already run Linux, and Android is just a Linux distribution optimised for low-power systems.

Android has been criticised for having a non-standard development environment. Its native development tools use the Java language, but don't provide a full Java platform, so you can't just take any existing Java application and run it on Android. This is because Android has been designed to squeeze into the smallest hardware specification possible, rather than through some desire to control what runs on the platform.

There are other distributions of Linux for netbooks available which are closer to a standard distribution. These have virtually none of the drawbacks of Android, but will require more powerful hardware. If you buy a Linux-based netbook today, it will come with one of these distributions. What, then, does Android have to offer netbook users? Longer battery life, a simpler interface, a more responsive system? Maybe all, or none of these things.

Whether Android is a good choice for a netbook is not the issue, rather it's that netbook manufacturers have that choice. They can even choose to take parts of Android, add more conventional Linux components to it to increase the number of applications that will run out of the box. It's possible that proprietary operating system vendors would allow modifications on this scale, but they almost certainly wouldn't allow redistribution of the source code, and would probably still charge their per-unit licensing fee, despite the hardware vendor having done much of the integration work.

Netbooks have been an interesting development which have sold in markets where traditional notebooks wouldn't have. This means that vendors have been able to sell more units than might otherwise be the case, and for good reason: customers have been able to buy a device that better fits their needs than full notebooks or handhelds. Everyone wins. This wouldn't have been possible if the hardware companies developing these devices hadn't had an easily-modified operating system distribution available, or had to commit to per-unit licensing costs before it was clear netbooks were going to be a success.

It's this ability to take an idea and see where it goes that's the power of open source software. If some manufacturers try putting Android on their devices, rather than a heavier distribution, that's up to them and the market will decide whether it's a good idea. Having to stick to one operating system vendor's idea of what a device should be capable of would prevent hardware innovation, and that stops people buying the device they want.