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How About an iPhone OS Or Android-Based Netbook?
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.)
http://openpandora.org/ - can run unbuntu, pocket-sized and a 10 hour battery life = win!
Yes, the Debian on G1 install gives you access to phone, Android, and Debian functionality at the same time. At the moment it's done with a chroot environment, but there are plans to package/replace the Android stuff to give a native Debian install. Basically, libc and the dynamic linker are non-GNU under Android, but they are standards compatible, so it shouldn't be too difficult to replace them. The G1 runs Linux by default, so of couse there is already support in its kernel for the phone hardware.
Cellphone technology based "laptops" have existed for years, and they have a solid fan base, but they are still big cellphones, not small PCs.
Actually, the iPhone OS IS Mac OS X. All Apple did was add some hardware support and a bit of custom GUI to better support the minimal size of the screen and the mouseless interface. Mac OS X is very modular, versatile, and it has the ability to scale down or up well depending on the resources available to it. It's vastly different than just taking a cellphone OS and modifying it for a netbook, Apple would just use the regular Mac OS X and add hardware support so it could run on a netbook.
All of this looks like it's gone over the heads of the people at ZDNet. They talk about Mac OS X and the iPhone OS as if they were two completely different animals instead of both being Mac OS X. They don't seem to realize that you can have your cake and eat it too: a version of Mac OS X that runs like a laptop version and yet has a small OS "footprint" like a cellphone version. You certainly can and it wouldn't take a major reworking of anything to get the job done.
Sapere aude!
I doubt your eye could perceive the extra detail at a sensible viewing distance anyway.
He wants about 300dpi which is starting to get into printer resolution range. That would enable serif fonts (like times) to look better than sans serif fonts (arial, helvetica). You would also find smaller point fonts more readable thanks to the additional pixels. So viewing a webpage might finally make sense on a device that small that is commonly held in your hand like a book or a sheet of paper. If we could get to OLED contrast ratios and that dpi, your display would basically look almost like a printed photograph. With current displays at around 90 to 100dpi, everything looks pixely (windows) or blurred because of the low dpi of the display.
Today 300dpi might be unreasonable for a color display. I think e-ink displays get to about 300 dpi but they can't display color or refresh quickly. My 9" eee pc lcd screen is at about 130 dpi. So I think lcd manufacturers should be able to get that up to 150 dpi or so.
I'd like to see the more expensive electronics manufacturers (sony, apple) demand high dpi displays because everything would really start to look sharp without anti aliasing or sub pixel lcd tricks. For example just imagine going from 100 dpi to 200 dpi. That means in the same pixel on 100 dpi you now have 4 dots instead of 1 to render it. If the font is adjusted for the higher dpi, curved or diagonal lines would look super sharp.