Chipmaker Freescale is to support Google’s Android as a netbook platform, part of its efforts to get ARM processors powering the popular miniature machines. Its ambitions are broad: Freescale wants half the market, and thinks it can get it by aiming cheap and aiming West. From CS News:
Freescale is clearly aiming for a market below the current netbooks, and they are striving for a price point of less than 200 USD, maybe even 100 USD. Their target market is young users in the west, and their netbooks will only provide Wi-Fi connectivity. “For price reasons, the netbooks are going to primarily be shipped with just Wi-Fi. For mobile professional users, you do need 3G connectivity,” Glen Burchers, marketing director for Freescale’s consumer business, said.
Also to be supported are Xandros, a popular cut of Linux, and HyperSpace, an instant-on environment similar to Splashtop. It’ll be neat to see another platform enter this biz, but I doubt we’ll be seeing these guys on the OSX netbook compatibility chart.
Freescale to use Android [OS News]
The hardware looks very promising; but why, why did they pick Xandros, probably the suckiest of the Debian derivatives? Luckily Linux Arm support is reasonably mature, so it should be easy enough to pave the Xandros install and replace it with something worth using; but still.
I thought freescale was gunning for Ubuntu with the whole ARM/Canonical initiative…