Freescale adds Android, Xandros netbook support (ZDNet UK)

Posted Feb 18, 2009 20:39 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
In reply to: Freescale adds Android, Xandros netbook support (ZDNet UK) by man_ls
Parent article: Freescale adds Android, Xandros netbook support (ZDNet UK)

This puts Xandros and Canonical squarely in place for a head to head competition for OEM partnerships in the next round of netbook offerings based on the Freescale i.MX515. Xandros had a significant first mover advantage in the first round of netbooks with its Asus partnership so its difficult to do a side by side comparison with Canonical on the current crop of intel netbooks. It just wouldn't be fair to Canonical since they came in so late and had to deal with competition for XP versions of the same hardware. Something Xandros didn't have to seriously compete with initially.

But for the Freescale based devices, both Canonical and Xandros are going to be at the starting gate together without Windows XP or Windows 7 as competition, so it will be an interest head to head competition as to who can provide better value to OEM partners for what is essentially the same underlying Debian bits.

Here's Xandros press release about the Freescale arrangement.
http://www.xandros.com/news/press_releases/Freescale_MWC_...

But that's not all. Xandros is also partnering with Qualcomm for a not-quite-a-netbook-not-quite-a-phone form factor target. I haven't seen a press release from Canonical about Qualcomm yet. Perhaps this is another big opportunity for Xandros to get out in front in a new device market and reap the benefits of a first mover advantage just like it did for netbooks with Asus.

http://www.xandros.com/news/press_releases/Qualcomm_MWC_0...
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7836869314.html

-jef

Freescale adds Android, Xandros netbook support (ZDNet UK)

Posted Feb 19, 2009 2:34 UTC (Thu) by HalfMoon (guest, #3211) [Link] (1 responses)

This puts Xandros and Canonical squarely in place for a head to head competition for OEM partnerships in the next round of netbook offerings based on the Freescale i.MX515.

My first reaction is: how about OMAP 3530 based offerings? OMAP has a much better established Linux community, better power usage, and is (from what I can tell) more mature. Freescale hardware has been a bit flakey, and this chip of theirs is kind of too new for me to consider trusting. Consider the fact that I have four different OMAP3 boards handy ... only one of them being a pure developer board, three being commercial (or soon to be), all running Linux. OMAP3 has a lot of momentum, vs "no major orders yet" for Freescale.

Seriously ... it'd be good to see a comparison of the OMAP vs that Freescale in terms of stuff like completeness of Linux support, battery life, developer familiarity, and so on. All of those things matter hugely.

Freescale adds Android, Xandros netbook support (ZDNet UK)

Posted Feb 19, 2009 17:32 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

I don't believe I've seen Canonical mention OMAP specifically...but they are working on it. There is evidence of ongoing omap kernel work.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDSJaunty/Report/Kernel

You'll also find Mer interesting:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/About
http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Releases/0.8

It has a build for the BeagleBoard. Mer is currently positioned as an Ubuntu derivative distribution using launchpad, but I don't know how involved Canonical is in the effort.

-jef"still finds it amusing that Fedora is listed as a distribution in launchpad..with bug tickets"spaleta