Android / Windows 7 Dual Boot Netbook Disappoints

Barence writes "PC Pro has got its hands on Acer's Aspire One D250 with both Windows 7 and Google Android installed. Anyone who's played with an Android phone had better get ready for a let-down: Android is far from ready for netbooks. The review laments the lack of a proper Marketplace, the poor implementation of both the inbuilt browser and Firefox, and the general pointlessness of it all in its current incarnation as a quick-boot alternative. Yes, it will get better, but at the moment it's hardly going to lure people away from even Windows 7."

Comments

People rarely try twice

[Yvan256]

[...] at the moment it's hardly going to lure people away from even Windows 7.

Not only that, but it will give Android a bad reputation. And given that people usually stick with what they know and rarely (if ever) check alternatives, it might be a long time before they try Android again.

Heck, Apple switched to a Unix core for their OS almost a decade ago and I still talk with people who think Mac OS 9 when they hear about Macs.

Re:People rarely try twice

[rumith]

Not only that, but it will give Android a bad reputation

Why? The masses aren't likely to even hear about this netbook should it be a commercial failure (which is most likely), and the techies know better than to expect a smartphone OS to work for netbooks. So if anything, this will give Acer bad reputation.

Re:People rarely try twice

[skgrey]

This makes me very sad. It seems lately with all of the press of Android that's being aimed at the "typical" (read: non-geek) crowd (especially that Droid commercial against iPhones), usability like this is extremely bad. My wife, a total non-geek, knows what Droid and the Android OS is because she found the commercial interesting. If she tried Android out on a Netbook and had a bad experience she wouldn't ever try it again.

I've had a hard enough time getting her to use an iPod touch and now she loves it, but believe it or not she is doing INCREDIBLE with Windows 7 with little to no help from me, right off the bat. She actually said it was intuitive, and she is not a computer person in the least.

Android needs to get their act in gear quickly, especially if they are going after main-stream, non-geek people, as these people won't be coming back anytime soon, no matter how much their geek husbands beg.

Re:People rarely try twice

[Anonymous Coward]

People tend to talk. Stuff usually lasts your generation + some of the next.

Look at diesel engines. GM so farked up their implementation that everyone thinks they're slow, smokey, smell and can't start it the winter. Meanwhile Europe has 50+% diesel adoption.

I STILL get people (and young people that don't even remember the 70s) that tell me diesels can't start in the winter. I ask them how they like my 1998 TDI that is sitting out in the parking lot and they're floored. I tell them that my previous car was a 1986 diesel. Anemic as shit with no turbo but I was getting 50 MPG before Toyota even thought of a hybrid. Not to mention I can run it on any heavy oil from JP-1 to the shit that comes out of your deep fryer.

Anyone that has tried Linux in the past and found it too difficult has passed that knowledge on to their friends. "Linux doesn't do X" even though X was solved 3 years ago. Android has given a good name to Linux such that they don't know that it is. If Android screws up then someone big (as big as Google) is going to have to come up with another name for it.

Here we go again...

[nhytefall]

Isn't this the same old story we keep hearing? This F/OSS OS isn't ready for primetime, etc, no better than Win xxxx ... Seriously, can't we do better as a whole? So what if one "analyst" at a tech website says it sucks. Everyone jumps on board... maybe try it out for yourselves, and exercise some independent thought for once?

The burning question is...

[westlake]

but at the moment it's hardly going to lure people away from even Windows 7

From the reviewer's POV Win 7 Starter Edition looks pretty damn good.

The burning question, though, is why anyone would opt against booting into Windows 7 in the first place. Cold booting does admittedly take about three times as long as Android...but waking from hibernation takes a mere 20 seconds, just five seconds longer than the quick OS.

Windows 7 might feel a touch more sluggish than XP Home...but its refinement and ease of use come as ample reward, and importantly it suffers none of the aggravating limitations of its Google-powered rival.

As it stands, novelty merely serves as a brief distraction from the D250's competent, but unremarkable charms. We still hope future updates will reinstate the marketplace and make more of Android's obvious potential, but there are much better netbooks available for less.

The Verdict:

Google's Android OS provides a disappointing distraction from an otherwise average netbook

Re:Editorializing

[megamerican]

Nice editorializing - "Even Windows 7?" Cheap shot - you can do better than that, Slashdot

I don't think the editors of Slashdot can do any better.

Just the other day they made it sound like Windows 7 was uninstalling google toolbar and iTunes but it turned out that Windows 7 reinstalled it after the update. The person who made that comment in the story said it was the best Windows upgrade he had ever gone through.

If you had just read the title and/or summary it would seem like Microsoft was purposefully uninstalling competitors software when it wasn't even remotely the case.

What I don't get

[hairyfeet]

What I don't get is the choice of BOTH OSes on this thing. If you read the specs this thing is maxed out at 1Gb, which makes it a poor choice for Windows 7, which most reviews I've seen set 2Gb as the "sweet spot" for that OS to really perform, and Android? WTF? A mobile phone OS? Neither choice makes any sense at all. If they wanted a "quick boot" like we see in certain motherboards they should have put an embedded Linux in a ROM and went that way.

So to me this whole thing makes no sense whatsoever. Windows is being starved for RAM, and the Linux based OS is running on a platform it was never designed for, and which they apparently didn't bother to really tweak it for, although I doubt all the tweaks in the world will turn a phone OS into a Netbook OS. The only thing I can figure is some marketing genius got caught up in the buzz behind both OSes and said "Hey, if Android and Win7 have buzz, we can put out a Netbook with BOTH and get double plus buzz!" but as we have seen time and time again playing buzzword bingo usually ends up a giant can o' fail, as we can see here.