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Friday, July 17, 2009

Who wins? Netbooks, smartbooks, and Google's Chrome OS

From Ars Technica -

Based on a partial list of hardware manufacturers that support the Chrome OS - Acer, ASUS, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba, it seems likely that Chrome will emerge as the OS of the so-called smartbooks (netbooks that use ARM processors instead of Intel's Atom) and as a complement to Windows on netbooks.

Currently, ARM-based smartbooks have insufficient power to satisfy even netbook users, whose own Atom experience have already toned down their expectations. In addition, there is no ideal OS for the smartbooks yet, with Android being more of a mobile phone OS at this time. However, the next generation of ARM processors, the Core A9, due in 2010, should be a more robust processor and a more heavyweight (in terms of multitasking, performance, stability, and APIs). With the right OS, a Core A9 smartbook should be able to do cloud computing just fine. And that OS will likely be Chrome.

When this happens, users can have both Chrome OS and Windows on Atom-based netbooks. For Google apps and surfing, they can quick boot to Chrome; for all others they can boot up Windows.

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