No Windows for Smartbooks
Looks like Smartbooks really won’t be running on Windows after all.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip-powered Smartbooks are expected to be out in the market at the end of the year, but Microsoft doesn’t plan to come up with a Windows version for this souped up smartphones (or scaled down netbooks, depending on your point of view).
Steve Guggenheimer of Microsoft’s original equipment manufacturer division says that the company “has no plans to port a PC version of Windows over to the ARM core”. Windows operating systems run on Intel and AMD’s x86 instruction set, but not on ARM-based processors which these smartbooks will be using. Neither is Microsoft compeled to develop an OS that could run with one.
If you can remember, Microsoft hasn’t been all that successful with popularizing tablet PCs so it’s understandable that they’re skeptical about the smartbooks. Of course, they could find themselves where Apple is now with regard to netbooks. We all know what they think of the netbook market.
Microsoft’s refusal to run smartbooks leaves the market wide open for Linux and Google Android. Smartbooks will most likely run on Linux, but Android is currently being tweaked to run on first generation smartbooks.
As Guggenheimer emphatically said, “We’ll see what happens.”
via PCWorld.com
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Filed under: Netbook Thoughts
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