Qualcomm Android Netbook

Netbooks are just great. Simple, inexpensive, portable computers with a primary function to access the Internet. It would not be a far stretch to bring the 80/20 Pareto rule here, saying they deliver in terms of personal computing 80% of what we expect from a personal computer. Or may be even for 80% PC users they deliver all the need? Netbooks are great, but really both the hardware and the software is not ready for netbooks yet. I mean client side hardware and software. We are getting close. Intel with the Atom chip is aiming at perfect netbook design. Perfect meaning enough processing power to render Web pages quickly and very little battery drain to keep the machine running for hours (if not days) on a single charge. But what we really still lack is a client operating system designed from scratch to be a Web - client operating system.

At 2009 CES this month Qualcomm demonstrated Google's Android OS on the Snapdragon platform. Android had initially been targeted at mobile phones, as had been the Qualcomm chips. Nowadays phones are more computers than phones and what still keeps us thinking of them as phones are their tiny screens and lack of large qwerty keyboards. But as I mentioned a few weeks before - the Snapdragon platform is capable of delivering much more than just a phone. With dual core, 1.5GHz processor, WSXGA and cellular/bluetooth/WiFi conenctivity, the Snapdragon is more than enough to power a netbook. Couple that with power efficiency being the primary and long time target set by Qualcomm engineers and suddenly we may be getting the best netbook hardware possible. And suddenly we realize the best netbook hardware platform is the native platform to run probably the most promising netbook OS - the Android. Android may not be the most capable netbook OS at the moment, but being designed from ground up to be a network OS and with Google behind it I am sure it will soon prove its primacy.

The open question now is which company will present the first Snapdragon / Android netbook... It will happen in 2009. But who will be behind it? HP? Lenovo? Toshiba? HTC? Place your bets...