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How About an iPhone OS Or Android-Based Netbook?

Posted by timothy on from the upsides-and-downsides dept.

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.)

2 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Search physical books with Android by cnnetc · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    My mom recently sent me a copy of The Last Lecture , a book based on the inspiring talk given by Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch a few months before he passed away. I particularly remember him starting the talk with push-ups; a poignant introduction to the topic of terminal illness.

    The Last Lecture was one of the first books we tested on the Barcode Scanner application, a new searching tool available for download on Android-powered phones. Here's how it works: when you open up the application, the screen will show what the phone's built-in camera is seeing. When you line up the camera in front of a book barcode, it will automatically zoom, focus and scan the ISBN - without you even needing to click the shutter. As you can see below, you'll then have the option search the full text of the book on Google Book Search right away.

    Here, I'm searching for push to find all the pages that mention push-ups, and they're displayed below the search box.

    For students, this could be an easy way to locate that critical passage that the professor was talking about in lecture. Or if you're browsing through the shelves of a bookstore, you could use this application to easily determine whether a book contains the information you're looking for.

    This is the first release of this program, so there may be some hiccups. Most of the books supported by this tool were printed in the mid-1990s or later, because it took some time for ISBN barcoding standards to stabilize. And of course, not every book is on Google Book Search. Yet even with these limitations, it's a lot of fun to search through a paper book using your mobile device, and I think the tool opens up new ways to experience printed works.

  2. Re:I think that's wrong. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    If you take your desktop that runs Mac OS X well with 1 GB of RAM and you take it down to 256 MB of RAM it will still run decently.

    Considering that Mac OS X famously runs slow as molasses on anything with less than 2 GB of RAM, you'd have a hard time finding a desktop that runs it "well" with 1 GB of RAM in the first place. When you take it down to 256 MB of RAM, it will run but we have different opinions on what can be considered "decently". After all, people have gotten windows xp to run on a pentium I, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to use it on that machine.

    Don't get me wrong. Mac OS X is an extremely good OS, especially on efficient battery use. I get an extra hour on OS X than I do on windows using my macbook pro. Ubuntu is a goddamn battery hog on the same computer (there might be a way to tune it better, but default settings don't give me much savings. However, you've picked the wrong thing to praise it on. The thing needs TONS of ram to run at a decent speed.