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Android / Windows 7 Dual Boot Netbook Disappoints 133

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the accepting-patches dept.
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."
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Android / Windows 7 Dual Boot Netbook Disappoints More

Android / Windows 7 Dual Boot Netbook Disappoints

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  • People rarely try twice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:33PM (#29849289) Homepage Journal

    [...] 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 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rumith ( 983060 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:46PM (#29849495)

      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.

      • Unless the netbook is successful, but people learn that the instant-on Android OS is unusable, ie an expensive non-feature. The last thing a new platform needs for marketing is a broken deployment,

    • Re:People rarely try twice (Score:5, Interesting)

      by skgrey ( 1412883 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:46PM (#29849503)
      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: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Android needs to get their act in gear quickly

        This doesn't have a damn thing to do with Android. Android was not made for laptop computers. Properly implemented on a cell phone, MID, or PMP, Android runs exceptionally well, is intuitive, powerful, and fun. Acer is the problem here. I don't understand why companies take something like Android or Linux and implement it so poorly as to be practically worthless. Seriously, if you're going to do it, do it right.

        Look at Apple, they took BSD and made it into something beautiful (not that it wasn't beau

        • "alternate" desktops work well in the smartphone (Score:4, Insightful)

          by alizard ( 107678 ) <alizard&ecis,com> on Friday October 23, 2009 @05:08PM (#29851695) Homepage
          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.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by skgrey ( 1412883 )
          I probably should have clarified a bit so it made a little more sense, I wanted to keep my post fairly short and concise but I can see that I didn't get my point across very well as I re-read it and see the responses.

          Most of my friends (and some of hers) are geeks, and many of them talk about technology and have Netbooks. I should have specified that if she heard from geeky people that Android wasn't great, or tried one of their laptops, it wouldn't be a good thing at all. The old adage that there's no b
        • Android was designed for touch screen interface - finger-friendly touch screen to be exact. No wonder it feels "clunky" using a pointer device like mouse/touchpad.

      • Re:People rarely try twice (Score:4, Insightful)

        by CopaceticOpus ( 965603 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @04:30PM (#29851131)

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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sowth ( 748135 ) *

          Yes, MS DOS and MS Windows were such flops.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LarryRiedel ( 141315 )

      So which mobile phone OS (not Moblin or Chrome OS) will they be running on their netbook as an alternative?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Old97 ( 1341297 )
        None. The whole point of this exercise is to address shortcomings in the main O/S and how its configured with the hardware. A more reliable implementation of hibernate or sleep will make this moot. Instead of shutting down and then waiting several minutes to boot the next time you want to use the computer, you'll just put it in hibernate or sleep mode and wake it up when needed. Windows hasn't been very reliable about doing this in the past, Once fixed, you won't need a secondary O/S for fast access.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ZosX ( 517789 )

          Huh? I've never had a problem since windows 2000 with hibernation or sleeping. I did have issues with windows 7, but the damned card reader driver wouldn't release. A proper driver fixed all my issues. In my experience hibernation in linux is basically like russian roulette. It has never worked for me, personally, but I kind of gave up trying a year or so ago. Wait a second. I'll try it in a VM on virtualbox 3.08....wow...it worked. Its about time. Wish the virtualbox tools would work under 9.10......

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Old97 ( 1341297 )

            I do and not just with Windows XP. Mac OS/X (10.4) had occasional issues restoring connections after wake up too. In fact with XP on our Thinkpads at work, freeze ups related to docking/undocking and hibernation are a daily occurrence.

            Whether it is a problem with drivers, background apps or the ACPI or any other problems, it is something that needs to be fixed. If hibernation and/or sleep are seen to be reliable they will be used more often instead of shutdown so the need for something like the solut

    • Re:People rarely try twice (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23, 2009 @03:11PM (#29849859)

      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: (Score:2)

        by sowth ( 748135 ) *

        No, I think so many users insistence on MS products has to do with another slashdot story: The Science of Irrational Decisions [slashdot.org].

        Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls 'arbitrary coherence.' Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions. That's the coherence part. Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made.

        They are just stuck o

    • Lets see.

      From the complaint that's there, it sounds like simply fixing the market (aka enabling) will take care of 90% of the problems. this of course assumes customer firmware can make nice flavors of android for this purpose.

      meanwhile, I thought google was making their own chromeOS anyway, which wasn't a smartphone OS (as below).

  • Editorializing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:35PM (#29849309)

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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Churla ( 936633 )

      Look, if we as a community can't even get some cheap shots in on the new OS how will we ever stay on "Big Steve's" Christmas Card list?

    • Re:Editorializing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kingduct ( 144865 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:59PM (#29849705)

      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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by megamerican ( 1073936 )

      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.

      • Re:Editorializing (Score:4, Informative)

        by Churla ( 936633 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @03:24PM (#29850073)

        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.

    • Maybe the submitter is an Android fanboy. "Android on this netbook is so un-perfect that buyers might decide to switch back to what's probably the best operating system they've ever seen before it." Yeah. Harsh criticism alright.

      Note: I'm not implying that Win7 is the best OS out there; it's just the best OS most people actually get to use on a general-purpose computer... with the compatition being earlier versions of Windows, Splashtop and now Android.

  • I'm completely shocked. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:37PM (#29849347) Journal
    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... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rumith ( 983060 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:41PM (#29849419)
    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...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by cptdondo ( 59460 )

      It's a plot! Redmond is secretly paying off Acer to do this, so that they can give Android a bad rap and save Windows CE. I have proof but I can't take my tinfoil hat off right now....

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sowth ( 748135 ) *

        Or Acer is using this to negotiate a better deal with Microsoft and doesn't care whether Android succeeds or not. I'm beginning to think Asus did the same thing. Why would they use such crappy distros if they were serious. I am not a big fan of Ubuntu, but it is far more polished than Xandros or apparently Android are.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sporkme ( 983186 ) *
      Google Blog announcing Chrome OS
      http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html [blogspot.com]
      Paragraph 5:

      Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks.

      It is arguable that this was included as a hat tip to the Acer deal.

  • no touch screen (Score:3, Insightful)

    by czmax ( 939486 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:44PM (#29849459)

    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 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by unitron ( 5733 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @03:13PM (#29849875) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • As we all know (right?), the only intuitive user interface is the nipple; the rest is all learned:

        http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2002/08/nipple.html [greenend.org.uk]

        Although... one can argue that a UI is intuitive by virtue of being easily learned, which it is by being similar to a UI you expect your users to already know.

        i.e. the Karmic UI will be intuitive (by my new definition) to Jaunty users. And (at least partially) to GNOME users from other distros.

    • They should have used a touch screen in the netbook. There are touch screen netbooks out there (dell latitude 2100 for one. There are touch screen replacement screens for other models if you wanted to hard hack a touch screen in). Acer should have just made a model with the touch screen as the display for the android netbook.

  • Here we go again... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nhytefall ( 1415959 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:46PM (#29849497) Journal
    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?

    • maybe try it out for yourselves, and exercise some independent thought for once?

      This is slashdot. We don't do that around here anymore, you must be new here.

    • 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?

      First impressions matter.

      Android as the "fast booting" Linux mini-OS had little to offer when compared directly to Win 7 Starter Edition installed on a mediocre entry level netbook.
      ______

      Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Family Pack (3-User) [amazon.com] $150 I believe this is a first for Microso

  • Holy vague summary batman (Score:3, Insightful)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:52PM (#29849581) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • The Kindle runs Linux. The impressive thing was setting up a chroot and installing Ubuntu in full on the device.

      It was also fairly useful, as it enabled certain features that you couldn't get off a normal Kindle.

    • 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?

      App Store, I presume.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mypalmike ( 454265 )

      >> 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 capital "M" means it's a proper noun. It's referring to Android Marketplace.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbcad7 ( 771464 )
        And the Win 7 Marketplace is where ? .. I knew what it was referring to, I just don't see the point of complaining that one OS doesn't have something when the other doesn't either.
        • Android has something called the Android Marketplace, which is an App Store analog. However, this specific implementation of Android lacks that feature. So it is valid to decry the lack of it and saying "lack of a proper Marketplace" is understandable if you roughly know how Android works. "lack of Android Marketplace" would've been a much better way of saying it, though.

          It's as if they sold a computer dual-booting Windows and Linux and the Linux they ship comes without a package manager. In fact, that's

        • And the Win 7 Marketplace is where ?

          Here [windowsmarketplace.com].

          Yes, that is a Microsoft site. No, it doesn't sell anything other than Microsoft products.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by ZERO1ZERO ( 948669 )
      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?

      It's kind of like the functionality provided by apt-get, but only you have to pay for everything. And it's shiny.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Incorrect. I'd say 90% of the apps worth getting are free. And all apps overall about 98-99% are free. I've only paid for a few, most notably the nesroid NES emulator on my G1. Unlike the user-unfriendliness of the command-line-based apt-get, the Marketplace is a point and shoot affair that doesn't require special keys or repositories to be added just to get an app.

        Be careful about spreading misinformation, it makes you look like a clueless idiot. Par for the course, I guess, for most of the cute little

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sowth ( 748135 ) *

          Most of the apps in the "Android Marketplace" were free? They probably did come from apt-get. Apt-get has plenty of GUI front ends. I don't understand your "user unfriendliness" comment. You just tell it what you want. If you want to install the superkitten package, you would type "apt-get install superkitten" You only think it is hard because Microsoft marketing says so.

          Anyway, "user unfriendly" is a subjective term and varies depending upon the user. I had two strokes, and the constant pop-ups and nonse

    • I presume this means built-in browser?

      No they meant "inbuilt browser", note the co.uk domain... not everyone speaks English like we do in America. Grammar nazi fail.

  • The burning question is... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by westlake ( 615356 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @02:59PM (#29849699)

    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

    • It'll be interesting to see if 7 can repeatedly enter and exit hibernation without going wonky. I know a few people said they could get XP to do that, but it really only worked on a pristine system and even then would fail after hibernating more than once or twice.

      I'd be even happier if their suspend worked reasonably well. My mac notebook resumes from suspend in just a few seconds (if that) and is always usable before I'm ready to use it--and when doing so it is 100% reliable when doing so no matter how

      • I can't believe I've never seen a video of a side-by-side comparison of Windows and Mac doing the standard things--booting up, suspend, hibernate, restore, low stress battery runtime test, high use battery runtime test...

        You put your audience asleep.

        Without having proved much of anything really.

        There are just too many variables - in hardware, software, usage patterns, operating environments and so on.

        The simplest and cheapest way to extend battery life is with a heavier battery pack.

        The "instant on" browse

      • My experience on the Mac is approximately the same as on XP. Most of the time I don't have a problem in enter/exit hibernation on the Mac. But once in a while (a couple times a month), I can't get the login screen upon opening the laptop lid. Then I have to close the lid and open it again a few times before it works. And a couple times a year, I do have to cold boot when just nothing coaxes a login screen.

        Then, sometimes it also takes a few minutes for the wireless connection to get working and occasiona

        • How do you usually convince the mac to hibernate? Usually you have to pull the battery or let it drain all the way--is there some trick I don't know?

          Also, you're right about it being different, but I have almost never seen a PC (out of dozens) that can stand more than 4-5 suspend/resumes or 2-3 hibernates, and I've never seen a mac (out of 5 or 6) that has a problem with it.

          I am fairly careful about not opening the lid until the light is winking though--I think I saw someone have a problem with closing the

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @03:20PM (#29850015)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • 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?

      The install is Windows 7 Starter Edition. Two steps down from Home Premium.

    • 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,

      it is claimed that it is the same hardware as the D250 (which I have) which means it is expandable to 4GB using the new 4GB DDR2 SODIMMs. Tested and working on D250. I'm hoping that the AOD250 software loads on my D250, which I put some low-latency DDR2 into (it's got 2GB, which it what it came with.)

  • Sorry, but I think your "even Windows 7" swipe is silly. As much as I love *nix and like to poke fun at Microsoft (I grew up on SunOS, HP-UX, IRIX, and Linux), I find Windows 7 to be a delight to work with (I run RC1 at home on two systems, an old P4 system and a newer Core 2 Duo). I would love to see a good desktop version of Linux, but Gnome, KDE etc. are just not polished enough (yeah, yeah, Ubuntu is pretty nice and all, but the desktop is still klunky). As a developer I miss the power of the command l

    • I'm just hoping the horrible issues I've had while playing Steam games(random bouts of lockup for a few seconds while my CPU has a seizure) or the extreme choppiness of the openGL viewport in Maya can be resolved with better drivers from nVidia. If not, I may need to switch back. Yes, it's miles above Vista and Aero Peek is an awesome feature, but still....these better just be growing pains or driver features(which I can understand on a new OS) and not some stupid attempt by Microsoft to screw with OpenGL

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Rockoon ( 1252108 )
        I run plenty of steam games on Win7 RC with an 8800GT and have experienced absolutely none of your issues
        • Good to know. You must be very happy indeed. Seriously, what's with the caps? Did I offend you? As for experiencing none of my issues(okay, so that is a little fun), I'm far from the only one running into issues of losing acceleration on hardware shading mode in the Maya OpenGL viewport.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sowth ( 748135 ) *

            The above poster was offended you weren't using his "one true" Operating System(tm).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by heffrey ( 229704 )

      Why don't you just run those command line tools on Windows?

    • Try OS X. Apple managed to put a solid GUI on a *nix base a LONG time ago. you can pop open a terminal window and "bash" away any time you want. When I first saw OS X, I thought it would be the catalyst that provided inspiration to the Linux community, leading to a golden age of Linux interface design. Turned out, not so much. There have been improvements, of course, but progress is slow.

  • I call conspiracy as Acer is a traditional MS whore (builts hardware specifically for Windows, drivers suck on Linux, etc...).
    I would not be surprised if they did this Android exercise to show how great Windows 7 is as well as knock Android down a notch before WinMo6.5 (and Zune) comes out.
    • Probably not but, then again, I wouldn't be surprised to learn you were not far from the truth. In fact, I've always had a BIG problem with how Linux has been implemented on these netbooks. It seems as if most of the OEMs just sort of threw any old thing on these machines, and that optimizing the installs for the machines was an afterthought (if they even thought of doing it at all). I have sort of a pet theory on why Linux on many netbooks was half-baked: my guess is that the manufacturers were probably l

  • Obligatory... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jDeepbeep ( 913892 ) on Friday October 23, 2009 @03:45PM (#29850387)
    Perhaps Linux just isn't ready for the desktop. I'm sticking with Microsoft.
    :P

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cenc ( 1310167 )

      The pointless MS astroturfing for win 7 seems fairly blatant around slashdot today. You would be like number 20 on this topic alone, that has not contributed anything other than to stroke MS.

      MOD these suckers!!!!

      • Perhaps, just perhaps, you know Windows 7 isn't quite as bad as many anti-MS people would like it to be? Perhaps people actually like Windows?

  • Granted, the software on my G1 phone still isn't ready for prime time, but I believe anybody that is used to a real computer would be disappointed working on a netbook. They generally combine the limited battery life of a notebook with lack of screen real estate and optical drive of a PDA.

    Android really is effectively beta software. (Still haven't added Bluetooth Stereo profile?!?) The amazing thing is that they are charging people lots of money for phones based on this work-in-progress. By the time it ha

  • Android: An android is a robot or synthetic organism designed to look and act like a human.

    I suppose it is supposed to infer a humanistic or human centric intuitive interface.

    However it: Doesn't look like a human. Doesn't act like a human. Isn't a robot.

    At least Ubuntu is a philosophy and Windows can count and describes a feature.

    Of course what the hell do apples or Macintosh's have to do with anything I do not know.
    Of course they have they have the best name of the bunch (ignoring leopards and tigers etc).

    • Oops forgot a "=" rather than "+"

      a) I don't edit
      b) none of my programs actually work and I only comment in my mind.
      c) I don't care :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sowth ( 748135 ) *

      A Macintosh is a juicy delicious Apple. And no, juicy and delicious are not homosexual adjectives.

      (Sex) Android is what the Google executive asked for, but he only had software engineers, so a mobile OS was the best they could do.

      Windows on the other hand, is a generic name of an OS construct--depending upon if you count the GUI components and the browser as part of the OS. It is like naming a car "Steering Wheel" or an airplane "Wing" or naming a company after the CEO's penis. It's just silly.

  • I don't really see any reason not to go with a conventional Linux desktop any more than netbook manufacturers see any reason to go with anything but a conventional XP or Win7-lite install for their netbooks. Give me conventional desktop icons and a normal taskbar and the normal selection of Open Source apps, not giant icons to programs that don't do much and a handful of programs from a company repository that prepare the netbook for websurfing and not much else.

    The only important consideration is that th

  • Once again... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Alex Belits ( 437 ) * on Friday October 23, 2009 @05:59PM (#29852199) Homepage

    ...a Windows PC company tarnishes Linux reputation by pre-installing something that is not Ubuntu on a consumer device.

    • "...a Windows PC company tarnishes Linux reputation by pre-installing something that is not Ubuntu on a consumer device."

      That's why we should discourage bundled Linux installs. No one gets it right, Linux users already know what they want, and most Linux installs are easier than installing Windows if the hardware is supported.

      What would be useful is to be able to conveniently buy prebuilt computers with no OS installed.

      • Do you have some mental disease that reduces your reading comprehension to the level one should expect from a three years old, or are you intentionally distorting the point that I have expressed in the most unambiguous form possible?

        Everything would work just fine if they installed a distribution specifically designed for this purpose -- Ubuntu.

  • Do you guys not see the massive MS astroturfing going on in this topic, not to mention the original article?

    People please?

    Is slash getting a paycheck for this one?

  • Offtopic but interesting to me was an ad on the tv last night for a new laptop with windows 7 on it. Apparently the next big thing is being able to tile windows vertically. They called it "snap" or something stupid. Is this what we can expect from a new operating system ? A new name for an old concept that works quite well on every windows OS since 3.1 ? Maybe they should advertise "minimise" as a new way to rapidly expose your desktop - they could call it expose - no wait...

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