Android Now Running on Netbooks

According to VentureBeat, they have gotten Android to successfully run on an Asus EeePC netbook, with most of the drivers working and functional. Mike Benton over at AllShadow.com tipped us of the news, and the concept looks cool and very functional at this stage.

The concept, which brings the Linux-based open-source operating system to a larger screen display and more full featured keyboard, is similar in concept to Celio's implementation with the REDFLY. The main difference is that with Android on a netbook, the OS actually resides on the netbook; REDFLY's solution actually tethers a Windows Mobile device to the added laptop-like hardware, much like how you would connect a display and keyboard to a computer.

Given the EeePC's larger screen, it seems that Android supports different screen sizes and scaled relatively easily. Given's Linux's existing drivers, it seemed that VentureBeat was able to get a lot of hardware components on the EeePC working without having to create new drivers from scratch:

Android’s Linux core makes experimental compilations like ours possible. For example, compilations require something called drivers. Drivers are programs which are needed to communicate an operating system like Android with various computer hardware. There are already a lot of Linux drivers, and Linux is able to run on a lot of different computer architectures. Otherwise we’d have needed to build our drivers from scratch.

Since the Android Market isn't yet available, VentureBeat was not able to test out that feature yet.

We can probably expect Android to show up in netbooks probably around 2010.