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.

Re:People rarely try twice

[CopaceticOpus]

True, an OS that takes many attempts and several years to get it right will never make it in the marketplace.

Editorializing

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Editorializing

[kingduct]

The Slashdot community doesn't pretend to be unbiased, and why should it? The important thing is that you, as a reader, be able to interpret and understand what others say.

Re:Editorializing

[CannonballHead]

Maybe slashdot should change their slogan to "opinions for nerds" then ;)

Re:Editorializing

[Churla]

As a note from personal experience.

Going XP 32 bit to Win 7 64 bit - The "export your files and settings" thing actually WORKS now. Fresh install, reinstall office and firefox, import the previous settings all worked flawlessly (including ALL my FF add ons...). Most painless Windows upgrade I can remember.

Re:Editorializing

[recoiledsnake]

"Opinion for anti-MS nerds" perhaps? There are plenty of nerds who aren't religious about hating "M$" and appreciate cool technology wherever it comes from.

I'm completely shocked.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Who would have expected that a slipshod port of a system designed for one human interface mechanism would fail on another? They even left out important features, what could possibly have gone wrong? Does this mean that my plan to port Bash to my wristwatch will be unpopular in the marketplace?

Seriously, though, this seems like completely unsurprising news. Just slapping dead-stock android on something(without even bothering to include features that are standard on smartphones, like the app mechanism), while giving no thought at all to the differences between a touchscreen and a touchpad, seems like an invitation to failure.

Well...

[rumith]

I doubt that Google had netbooks in mind when they released Android. Keep in mind that they have announced ChromeOS to be their operating system for netbooks (and possibly over time more powerful machines as well), and it should be pretty clear that Acer's experiment had very low chances to succeed anyway. However, if ChromeOS and Android somehow use compatible app markets, that might be interesting...

no touch screen

[czmax]

From the article:
"Indeed, where Android's browser makes sense on a smartphone's touchscreen, it just doesn't translate here. The process of clicking and holding the left mouse button, while pushing up to scroll the page down, seems clunky and counter-intuitive,"

Gosh, they took an OS designed for a touchscreen and tried a simplistic hack to make it work with a touchpad... and this isn't easy to use? Well, duh. This says nothing about Android and everything about the marketing folks that messed up.

Re:no touch screen

[unitron]

I know they aren't your words, but it is "scrolling" as we know it that is counter-intuitive, at least to anyone who's ever seen actual scrolls, even if only in the movies.

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?

Holy vague summary batman

[damn_registrars]

I'm not really sure what the writer is trying to say with things like

the lack of a proper Marketplace,

Do you mean you can't connect to ebay, craigslist, or google shopping? What is a marketplace in relation to an operating system on a computer?

the poor implementation of both the inbuilt browser and Firefox

I presume this means built-in browser?

and the general pointlessness of it all

When did things need to have a point to be featured on slashdot? It wasn't that long ago there was a front page story here about running linux on the kindle. Though if you want a point in the general sense, try:

in its current incarnation as a quick-boot alternative

Because that is probably all the more point a lot of people need from it.

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.

"alternate" desktops work well in the smartphone

[alizard]

market because people don't have fixed expectations as to how a smartphone UI will look, feel, and act, and expect to have to dig through menus or the instruction manual to do anything over and above simply making a phone call.

Netbooks look enough like "real" computers that people expect the UI to look and feel like a computer UI, not a smartphone UI.