HP Studying Google’s Android Platform for Ultraportables

How about Google’s Android operating system/platform for a notebook/laptop or even a netbook? Would you believe HP is taking a look at it?

It’s no April Fool’s joke. Reuters is reporting that Hewlett-Packard is looking at various ways that Google’s open-source operating system could be used. The article also mentions that the Wall Street Journal has sources claiming that HP is looking at Android as a platform for future netbooks.

Right now, Android has mainly been seen on mobile phones (or smartphones).

An HP spokeswoman declined to comment on any specific products, and only said that HP was studying Android in order to “understand all of the OS choices in the marketplace that might be used by our competitors, or that might possibly be of value to our customers too…..We want to assess the capabilities that Android might present for the computer and communications industries.”

HP is not the first to consider this, mind you. Back in February, the head of Asustek’s Eee PC line stated that Asustek had assigned engineers to look at Android-based netbooks and other Android-based devices, for a product that might be designed and finished by the end of this year. At the time, Asustek had not committed to a production run of any such devices, and as of now, they still haven’t, but it raised a lot of eyebrows.

Android is appealing - it’s free, it’s lightweight, has a large development community, and there are plenty of applications beginning to roll out for it, and being that it’s Google, an Android-based laptop/ultraportable will have access to most of the Google apps that many people use on a daily basis. People have been making Android run on non-mobile phone devices as well.

Given the “race to the bottom” as far as pricing, it could very well present a viable alternative to Linux on the $300 and lower devices.

Read: Reuters

Asus May Offer Android-Based Eee PC Netbook

In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Asustek’s Samson Hu (in charge of the Eee PC line) said that Asustek had assigned engineers within the company to work on an Android-based netbook and that it might be finished by the end of this year. They won’t make a decision on whether to offer it as a product (probably through the Asus Eee PC line).

Google’s Android (Code.Google.com/Android) is free, and has been booted up on some ultraportables. Right now, the majority of the market is running Microsoft Windows XP Home, with various distributions of Linux coming up in second place.

By the time this device would be finished, Windows 7 would probably be widely available as an OEM install on netbooks/ultraportables, however nobody is quite sure how much Microsoft is going to charge per device at this point. Microsoft would have preferred to have retired Windows XP before now, however Windows Vista was not a realistic option for these devices, both because of performance and because of price, and they faced the problem of letting this market be dominated by Linux had XP been discontinued.

Android would certainly not be an issue as far as performance or licensing fees on these devices - the main focus was to originally run on mobile phone handsets. This would be a reverse of Apple’s decision to port and scale OS X down to the iPhone level, since the OS would be scaled up to a laptop level. If anything, performance should be the same or better than Windows on the same device.

Freescale Semiconductor Inc. has been in talks with other companies, including Pegatron Corporation, to come up with a platform for netbooks that would be based on Android.

At this point, from what I’ve seen of Android, it would be able to easily handle most of what people are buying these devices for. It would be interesting, since this is all coming about just as we are not too far away from devices based on the NVIDIA Ion platform.

Read: Bloomberg.com