How About an iPhone OS Or Android-Based Netbook? 162
perlow (Jason Perlow of ZDNet) suggests that the current crop of netbooks might be missing the boat when it comes to getting maximum battery life and small-screen usability, and asks "Could Mac OS X iPhone or Google's Android be the key to mass adoption of the next generation of netbooks?" Android looks pretty nice, I admit, but so far I like having full-fledged Ubuntu on my own small computer. He's not the first one to think that the iPhone would be well-employed as the guts of an ultra-portable, though. (Note: it's only a model.)
Re:Smartphone power (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ZDNet is missing the point (Score:5, Informative)
I think the point they're trying to make is that cellphone based laptops don't necessarily have to be just big cellphones. There's absolutely no reason why Android can't run on a netbook - in fact, there's absolutely no reason why Android couldn't run on your desktop. It's all open source, so package up Dalvik and the class files for your Linux distribution of choice, compile Skia with the Cairo backend, and you should be able to run Android applications on standard Linux installs. Maybe it could do with some desktop integration, but it's certainly possible. You could possibly even replace Dalvik with OpenJDK, which should give a nice performance boost.
So back to the point: the G1 and other Android phones really are just small PCs - the clock speed of the T-Mobile G1 is over 10 times that of my 486 from a decade ago, and it has over 5 times more RAM, so clearly the technological distinction between a desktop and phone isn't as big as it used to be. Heck, if you have a jail-broken G1 you can run a full blown Debian install on it. Forget web applications, the time for a computer capable of running real apps in your pocket is right now.
Re:VERY bad examples (Score:4, Informative)
First off the PC wasn't an open design, it was closed but companies did a "whiteroom" re-engineering of the BIOS (something that the DMCA would outlaw today).
reengineering for inter-operability is allowed [chillingeffects.org]
IBM also published complete hardware designs. The closed components were the BIOS and the OS (which was Microsoft's, not IBM's).
The other example you give which is MP3 isn't really open
The format is open in that it is published, but it is patent encumbered. Once the patents expire anyone will be able to implement decoders and encoders, and there most of the patents will expire in the next two years.
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
>You know, sarcasm aside, the linux versions of these netbooks have a much higher return rate than the Windows versions.
That's debatable, I remember that one news (I think it was from MSI, not sure) said that the netbook with Linux had a much higher return rate that Windows but another news from Asus say that this isn't the case:
http://www.osnews.com/story/20568/EeePC_Return_Rate_is_Similar_for_Windows_and_Linux [osnews.com]
As both are using different distribution, maybe this could be the explanation or they have different market or someone is lying, I don't know..
Re:Smartphone power (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ZDNet is missing the point (Score:4, Informative)
Not completely (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the iPhone OS IS Mac OS X.
Heavily crippled. One thing is to be the full OSX, another is to have a small subset of features. Furthermore, you cannot run any program written for OSX in the iPhone. To me that's enough to say that the iPhone-OSX is not the same as OSX.
Re:I think that's wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
The iPhone OS is OSX because Apple "says" it is OSX, it's a real semantic BS thing. While I'm sure there's similarities, in reality the only sameness is the name. Seriously, do you think an old desktop Mac of the same power of the iPhone could actually run OSX?
Yes, I do. Mac OS X is designed to be highly modular and flexible. You might have to make some choices as to what modules to load, what services to keep active, and so on to meet the resource footprint of a slower Mac computer that has less RAM and disk space but at the core it would be the same Mac OS X that runs in an iPhone or a server.
Mac OS X will actually adjust itself to some extent to deal with a low-resource environment. If you take your desktop that runs Mac OS X well with 1 GB of RAM and you take it down to 256 MB of RAM it will still run decently. It'll keep less stuff resident in RAM and it will have to page to disk more often but it will keep running. I've run Mac OS X 10.5 on everything from a 500 MHz G4 machine with 256 MB RAM to a 3 GHz dual quad-core Xenon with 4 GB of RAM. Of course it ran quicker and more smoothly on the machine with more resources but it still ran decently on the old machine.
It's the same Mac OS across all of Apple's products because they all share the same core code. They all run off Darwin, they all use the same modified Mach microkernel, and so on. If you dig into all of the APIs you'll see differences here and there, mostly in the UI API, but even where there are differences the API mirror each other closely. It's the same operating system in far more than just semantics.
Re:The iPhone would work (Score:1, Informative)
without anti aliasing or sub pixel lcd tricks
At 300ppi, you would still want antialiasing to render the typeface with a more even tone distribution. You might not need the spatial resolution of 600ppi or more, but it is a big tone step from a one-pixel line to a two-pixel line at 300ppi.