Netbooks built with ARM Holdings'
Several in the industry have been anticipating Android netbooks for some time now, yours truly included. What's new is ARM's presence in this emerging market. A common architecture for mobile phones, ARM has never been much of a computer brand -- certainly not when compared to Intel
Netbooks aren't exactly PCs, though, and Android was designed from the start to crunch data in a way that ARM processors would understand -- just like every other mobile phone operating system.
So far, the Android-ARM combination is proving flexible and turning heads. For example, two Gartner analysts who saw Android-ARM netbooks in action at Computex spoke fondly of what might be.
"When Android did work, we found that the user interface was very snappy on relatively low-performance ARM processors, more so than Windows 7 on Atom," researchers Christian Heidarson and Ben Lee wrote in a note to clients.
So Android-ARM is the better alternative for netbooks? Not so fast, Fool. Microsoft
And yet there's no turning back. Android has shown ARM to be a viable, cost-effective, low-power alternative chip architecture for netbooks -- unleashing a hypergrowth opportunity for a company that's lacked one for far too long.
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