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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.)
Netbooks are popular because they run the software that people are used to. No converting of data files, no learning of new user interfaces. Everything you know, just on a small device with a battery life that is enough for a day.
Cellphone technology based "laptops" have existed for years, and they have a solid fan base, but they are still big cellphones, not small PCs.
The distinction may go away as the web replaces desktop applications, but that requires fast, reliable and affordable network access, IOW: not yet.
He's not the first one to think that the iPhone would be well-employed as the guts of an ultra-portable, though.
If Apple manufactures is, not on your life. I don't want to have to jailbreak the thing at each update, or be denied the right to run this or that on it.
I think the success Asus has had with the EeePC doesn't come so much from the PC's form factor or scale, as from the fact that it's ... just a PC, i.e. an open platform that doesn't require people to buy special software, and lets them run whatever they want on it. PDAs these days are powerful enough to do almost the same, but depending on the manufacturer, it can be a breeze, or a pain in the butt, to develop and run applications on them.
Come to think of it, this issue of openness (i.e. letting people do what they want without corporate greediness and power-freaking getting in the way) is what defines successful things from unsuccessful ones. MP3 for example is an open format, just look at the MP3 players industry now. PCs are essentially an open design, and it's been flourishing for decades, to the point that it's so entrenched that it gets in the way of better designs. On the other hand, ebooks for example are a dismal failure, because people have to jump through hoops (and pay dearly for the privilege of jumping) to get DRM-encumbered files that won't be readable on other devices.
One point to note here is that Smartphones of today are the "ultra-portables" of a couple of years ago, the laptops of about 5 years ago and the desktops of 8 years ago. The power of the devices is equivalent to what many modern OSes were developed upon, so the issue when looking at OSX(iPhone), Android or Symbian is purely on its better battery efficiency and better small scale UI.
Personally I'd add Symbian to the list as the old Psion 5mx and 7 were in effect the netbooks and ultra-portables of their time and Nokia have some tablet devices at the moment. Combined with the touch screen interfaces, especially the "drag" widescreen display that Android and the iPhone have, gives a robust, low power, operating platform with the added benefits of an easy to use set of installers.
So maybe the question isn't so much whether this is a good plan, but what marketing, software suites and public perception pieces are preventing these mobile OSes (mainly Symbian at this stage) being the default.
But one thing that isn't preventing them is the power of the devices, I'm continually stunned at the multi-processor power of my humble "mobile phone", for most people a netbook with the same processor as my phone (iPhone) but a bigger screen would be perfectly okay and easier to use for their core tasks (email, internet browsing, minor games).
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Let me know when I can run vi, gcc, PC/SC (smartcards), and Thunderbird (for its PKCS#11 smartcard S/MIME) on iPhone OS or Android. Otherwise STFUAGBTW.
You said it very well. It is really just the convergence of the cell phone and PC. I'd prefer the mostly open hardware and software flexibility of the PC wins over the locked down "just works" option of the cell phone. If we want to grow the netbook up from a phone maybe the OpenMoko platform would be a better bet?
How about I pound nails with a wrench instead? It would be about the same thing.
Use the right tool for the right job. Keep the cellphone OSes on phones.
http://openpandora.org/ - can run unbuntu, pocket-sized and a 10 hour battery life = win!
This is a great idea. Laptop users don't need to copy and paste either.
The Chinese can eat with sticks.
Talk about Redundant Redundancy Overkill. You'd get better performance making a native app then running it in the small devices browser.
This obsession with making everything in a browser so it's cross platform etc. etc. is stupid on small devices and especially using technologies where whole segments of the market doing adhere to standards.
Shhhh!
If so then why don't run that OS on my desktop? It would run like hell!
what would either offering on my netbook seek to achieve? are you just saying words at this point?
given apples track record, id hate to see 10-20 apps i cant install on the damned thing because apple has "banned" them. id also hate to see every semblance of music and video on my netbook buried under DRM encryption.
a google netbook? if you bought the EEEPc linux edition then technically you are using googles OS in a way, as it prefers to run its search monster on a custom flavor of linux.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The only Apple I want on my netbook is the one I'm having for my lunch!
MP3 for example is an open format, just look at the MP3 players industry now. PCs are essentially an open design, and it's been flourishing for decades
First off the PC wasn't an open design, it was closed but companies did a "whiteroom" re-engineering of the BIOS (something that the DMCA would outlaw today). It became more successful once opened but the original design was very much closed and of course the operating systems that made it successful are pretty much the poster child of the closed software movement. The other example you give which is MP3 isn't really open either (otherwise why would there be Ogg?).
So Openness can be a good thing, but your examples are in fact more examples of how closed works commercially as long as it develops an established market.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I don't think performance is the issue...
I could have a collaboratively edited spreadsheet or document on my work PC, then download it to my eee pc using Google Gears to work on the train on the way home where there isn't an internet connection. Then at home, I could re-synchronise the changes I'd made and edit the same document on my home pc.
Makes sense to me really...
Since it's basically just MacOS X under the hood. Apple would probably just have to install most of the OSX desktop APIs and provide some tweaks to the app launcher interface that the iPhone uses. However, I think the biggest incentive for them to not do this would be the perception that their product doesn't multitask which would be a turn off to some people.
So I'll have a big laptop-like device with an incredibly confined proprietary OS I can't change, and that has a tightly controlled application base?
Great! Sign me up! I totally hate how I can run any OS I please, any application I please. I want to have an OS that locks me into using the applications the manufacturer tells me I may use on my hardware!
You know, sarcasm aside, the linux versions of these netbooks have a much higher return rate than the Windows versions. If you make your device around an iPhone, you're looking at the same higher return rate for a confined OS that isn't windows, but you're also disregarding the benefits of an OS that costs about 5 bucks per machine. Basically, you're taking the worst of both worlds, and you don't even have a Windows XP version to sell to the masses when they realise that's what they really want.
It's been a long time.
No, that's not Google Docs. That's Google Gears. If the blog writer wants a port of Google Gears, then he should call for one. Docs doesn't require gears to work.
Put identity in the browser.
The reasons were: (a) It's small and (b) It's a PC
I want to use the same apps as my desktop machine so I can work with the same files on both.
More and more people want to compute on the move and the EeePC is portable in a way that laptops simply aren't. That's the reason they're selling millions, and deservedly so. It's a brilliant little invention.
No sig today...
Seriously, what is the point of these things? They are way too big to be used like a PDA, yet way too small to be used like a laptop. They're like little toys you show all your friends, then put on the shelf, and don't touch again for 6 months.
Anyone who thinks regular laptops are too big has been buying lower-end consumer-grade Dell and HP hardware for too long. My old 12" PowerBook looked like a PDA compared to those monsters, yet was still a very full-featured laptop.
What Netbooks need to do is lose the X86 (and clones) and go ARM based. Battery life will increase dramatically, and those of us in the Open Source world will barely notice a difference.
One of the nicest spreadsheets I've used was for my Psion Series 3. It came on an external ROM package (around 100KB, as I recall) and ran very nicely on a machine with a 4.7MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM (also used for storage via a dynamic RAM disk). There are other reasons for not using a web app (host platform integration being the best one), but performance is increasingly irrelevant.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Like Bill Clinton once said... or was it Al Gore? Anyway, most of the amazing battery performances of cellphones come from using dedicated, low power hardware.
A small, and absolutely not comprehensive list:
ARM based processor (yes, RISC is much more efficient and predictable, than whatever-i686-is)
Low-power wireless (that can be a true killer, especially true for WiFi, much less for WiMax)
No hard disk (that kills a lot)
Etc etc
Sure, software has its own share of guilt: mainly, the fact that mainstream OSes, in their standard configuration, are much oriented toward having to deal with x86 processors, hard disks, PCI buses, etc.
From those OSes, one can churn out a system that retains the kernel and some userland but does a better job handling low-power resources.
A practical example, my EeePc (from which I'm typing this) ran painfully slow when i first installed Fedora on it (default install, with LVM, big swap space, continuous disk access). Tweaking parameters here and there has fixed a lot of speed issues and, probably, makes the battery run better than it did.
Maybe one should try Ubuntu NetBook edition and do comparisons based on that.
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
The Linux version was cheaper and had a bigger SSD so I bought that and converted it...
No sig today...
My Palm Tungsten is a hell of a computer. With the IR keyboard, it serves as a somewhat awkward laptop. It got me to thinking, the only real difference between it and a proper laptop is the screen. Of course, the screen is over half the cost of a laptop so I kind of figured "Ah, that's why we don't see sub-$400 laptops." But then the netbooks came out and I said "well, looks like I called that one wrong."
What we're seeing here are the warring priorities of usage and form factor. If I'm on the go but need the full feature set of a proper desktop, I'm stuck with a laptop. I need the large screen, I need the keyboard and touchpad, I need to run proper PC apps. If I'm really on the go and can't afford to sit down and setup my laptop every time I need to do something, then I really need a PDA-format device. But then there are the situations, usually in businesses, where you end up with weird hybrids of those demands. That's where you see the tablet PC's that are supposed to serve as digital clipboard replacements. There's also the hybrid tablets where you can close the lid like a laptop or turn it around and close it and now you have a tablet PC. Personally, I think those units are just too damn fragile. The old-school blackberries were completely awesome and the biggest part of that was how durable they were. You could take these things into the field and do abuses to them that would make Jack Bauer toss his cookies and they'd still work. There's also a number of businesses that just put a proper desktop PC on a cart and say "haul it where you need it, plug it in when you get there." I've seen that for medical equipment and also inventory systems at warehouse stores.
It pretty much boils down to "how much screen do you need to display what you need to look at" and "how are you inputting information?" At this point, horsepower is pretty much a secondary concern, we can put amazingly powerful computers in little tiny PDA formats. But as powerful as they are, if you need to do a lot of typing, you need a computer. I can read slashdot just fine on a berry but I wouldn't have wanted to thumb-type this post on one.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think its likely that any touchscreen tablet from Apple would more or less simply be a larger version of the iPhone/Touch, but with similar hardware on the inside. This would have several huge advantages for Apple in terms of a business model.
Something like a 7 inch iPod Touch would provide most of the same functionality as a netbook, but have the advantage of a built in App store that Apple already tightly controls and has a monopoly on. The digital keyboard would save space and size, but a screen twice as large as the current iPhone/Touch would allow for greater usability. Such a product also follows with Job's claim that the iPhone is already a netbook.
I think any Apple entry into the Netbook market would rely heavily on the iPhone OS, especially since the whole idea over the iPhone OS is that its really, deep down at its core, Mac OS.
Having a phone/pda that is usable while I'm mobile yet powerful enough to be attached to a docking station which turns it into a PC is just brilliant. As long as the dock has additional ports and its own power source sign me up.
Wait. Isn't that describing a laptop? Have they finally improved the hardware for portable devices to the point of being able to put them in your pocket?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
A Windows Mobile phone and a Celio Redfly get you a phone-OS based netbook, and it works REALLY well. For browsing and e-mail and other web-based work, it's a great platform, highly portable, lasts a LONG time (I get 7+ hours from my Redfly, regularly), is small, lightweight, and instant-on.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
13'' Macbook serves me as a netbook pretty well. It's not too big to prevent you from taking it with you and it's not so small that you can't browse internet (in comfort of 1280x800 resolution).
You can run Skype on it and use it as a phone as well at any WiFi hotspot.
It's stable, and perfectly usable with only a keyboard and track pad (no need to bring a mouse).
And the keyboard is nice and you can actually type on it comfortably unlike most netbooks.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I want an integrated package, a robust good smartphone that is built to hard dock into a laptop shell like thing, the laptop-dock gives you a better screen, more battery, more storage, regular keyboard, and perhaps like an optical drive, etc, whatever would fit. The phones are getting really good and they could be the mainboard replacement for at least low specs useages and it should therefore make the laptop dock cheaper than full-on model. And upgrading would be simple then, whenever you feel like getting a newer cellphone, which would help that whole "laptops suck for upgrading" deal. You could keep the same "lapdock" machine, just replace the phone. I've wanted such a config for a long time now, seems a natural evolution. Netbooks try to cover both things and are lacking, because they are neither. cute idea..but neither...too small for a real computer feel etc, and, too large for pocket carry still. A phone/laptop dock combo would cover both bases as you need them. Give you two screens on a portable as well.
Google will make this move. Well somebody else may do this on behalf of Google cause Android is open enough to port it to your netbook or your set-top-box yourself.
And it makes sense. Read your mail on your TV? Check the weather for tomorrow or the stock quotes from today? Twitter sth. Chat with your mother?
Google would be stupid if the didn't support these new applications for Android. It helps to grow their own ecosystem AND helps to hurt Microsoft which has invested millions if not billions into these markets (and will likely fail to grab a significant market share in both).
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
I doubt that Apple would ever release an operating system for the Iphone. It is possible but I doubt it.
If Apple manufactures is, not on your life. I don't want to have to jailbreak the thing at each update, or be denied the right to run this or that on it.
Locking down the software that can run on a device may be a deal breaker for you, but it's a huge advantage for most users.
Most users would probably love a machine which is basically incapable of getting a virus because it's impossible to install malware on it in the first place.
So, sure, the average Slashdotter might hate a locked down machine, but for the majority of the population it would be an advantage.
Else you have zoom them and see itty bitty pieces
The Apple Airbook has the netbook weight and memory capacity. Except you pay $1700 for a legible screen, first-rate operating system and Apple class.
yeah but will you ever get support for flash?
As for the iPhone and it's OS, it's called a mac. The iPhone is supposed to be running Mac OS X modified to run on the arm and with extra restrictions.
Personally I think the iPhone UI is more suited for a pda/phone type device and the android OS would probably work better on a desktop, but that's just IMO.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Actually, the iPhone OS IS Mac OS X.
Heavily crippled. One thing is to be the full OSX, another is to have a small subset of features. Furthermore, you cannot run any program written for OSX in the iPhone. To me that's enough to say that the iPhone-OSX is not the same as OSX.
I certainly think the iPhone OS's GUI would make quite a good basis for a netbook. OS X in its current incarnation wouldn't work well on a netbook - the dock just takes up too much screen space for such a tiny screen, you'd have to lose it or have some way to hide it. But turn the iPhone onto its side and you'd have something similar to the Eee PC's GUI. And it's no mystery why the Eee PC is easy to use - the GUI is a modern classic, it's simple and easy to use, even if you've never used Linux before.
The iPhone OS is OSX because Apple "says" it is OSX, it's a real semantic BS thing. While I'm sure there's similarities, in reality the only sameness is the name. Seriously, do you think an old desktop Mac of the same power of the iPhone could actually run OSX?
Yes, I do. Mac OS X is designed to be highly modular and flexible. You might have to make some choices as to what modules to load, what services to keep active, and so on to meet the resource footprint of a slower Mac computer that has less RAM and disk space but at the core it would be the same Mac OS X that runs in an iPhone or a server.
Mac OS X will actually adjust itself to some extent to deal with a low-resource environment. 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. It'll keep less stuff resident in RAM and it will have to page to disk more often but it will keep running. I've run Mac OS X 10.5 on everything from a 500 MHz G4 machine with 256 MB RAM to a 3 GHz dual quad-core Xenon with 4 GB of RAM. Of course it ran quicker and more smoothly on the machine with more resources but it still ran decently on the old machine.
It's the same Mac OS across all of Apple's products because they all share the same core code. They all run off Darwin, they all use the same modified Mach microkernel, and so on. If you dig into all of the APIs you'll see differences here and there, mostly in the UI API, but even where there are differences the API mirror each other closely. It's the same operating system in far more than just semantics.
Sapere aude!
I have a 12" g4 ibook with 768MBs of RAM that runs OS X nicely and for the most part i have no complaints about it's performance. Does it play games well not really, but OS X is snappy and it does what i need it too. So in short, famously runs slow with less than 2GBs of RAM is a pretty bad exaggeration.
Since when does anything that comes out of zdnet matter anyway? This is the typical malinformed drivel one would expect from a 12 year old complaining he can't run Vista on his smart phone to download torrents and I have to say, EXACTLY what I expect from ZDNet.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
The PhoneBook - of course.
It's a small MacBook that uses the iPhone as the touchpad and for its radios. There is an app that displays the iPhone screen on the larger display. The PhoneBook runs regular MacOSX so all regular Mac apps work and all iPhone apps work, too.
Connectivity in the PhoneBook complements what is in the iPhone, and there are slots for 16MB+ SD cards to expand storage.
You can undock the iPhone to use it when you don't want or need the functionality of the entire PhoneBook.
"I never metadata I didn't like."
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.
Anyone saying that Mac OS X needs at least 2 GB of RAM to run decently is flat-out wrong. Unless you're running some pretty intense memory hog applications Mac OS X runs perfectly with anything above around 640 MB. Below that it does start to creak along at points but it will actually run OK down to 256 MB if you don't do much more than word processing and web browsing (the only activities that most normal use their computer for). I don't recommend running with less than 512 MB at a minimum.
Yes, if you have 2 GB of RAM Mac OS X will happily keep everything it sees in memory which will speed load times of a lot of things but unless you're doing hard-core gaming, database, audio, or video manipulation you really won't see an incredible speed difference between 640 MB and 2 GB. Give it a try sometime, I have.
Sapere aude!
All combined TabletPC's are too small of a market, even for a small company like Apple. -steve @ shareholders meeting. Netbooks, have so many compromises, less than an full OS, underpowered. Who "Needs" this product for work/school/hobby - is it worth no DVDs, a screen too small to read? Does not meet minimum requirements for Office? Who is this for??? iPod was for everyone who listens to music. Mac was for people who found computers complicated and too hard to use. iPhone gave one device with features which are useful instead of 95% unused.... Who buys a netbook, and why?
Apple is a business, with 30% profit margins. How can a $400 nettbook earn any profit? Why would most of the consumers "need" one? They are a "neat idea", but useful? Not so much...
How about you wish for an ARMv7-based netbook and an Ubuntu port instead.
iPhone isn't an OS in it's own right, you dick, it's a cut down version of Mac OS X. Are there any real nerds posting to /. anymore?
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1