“Today’s netbooks are not close to perfection at all. In two years, it will all be very different,” Jim Wong, Acer’s global president for IT products, told a news conference at Computex, the world’s second-largest PC trade show held in Taipei. Acer decided to move more quickly to work with Android because there is a strong development movement behind the software, he added. “If we do not continue to change our mobile Internet devices, consumers may not choose then any more.”
No prices are revealed but it seems that it would be not so costly as the Android netbooks will run on Intel’s low-cost and low-performance Atom processor. Currently, its Aspire One netbook series runs on Windows XP and will continue to do so even after the launch of its new Android version.
Analysts commented that it is too early to predict whether Acer’s new Android netbook will threaten Microsoft’s market dominance as the , pointing to an absence of software and applications that support Android. “We’ll still have to see what kind of applications the Android software can run on and how stable it’ll be,” said Vincent Chen, an analyst at Yuanta Securities.
The Aspire One netbooks Acer displayed at its news conference on Tuesday at Computex were running a dual-boot system allowing users to switch between Android and Windows XP, but Wong said the device that goes on sale later this year will only have Android and another Linux OS.
Just last week, Acer has announced that it will be releasing a smartphone powered by the Google’s Android operating system by this year. The PC maker aims to capture up to 5% of the smartphone market in the next five years by offering feature-rich handsets at a low price.
When US search engine giant Google introduced its open source Android operating system two years ago, it has sparked off many discussions by Internet and mobile phone users of whether it is successful in bringing the openness of the Internet to the mobile space.
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