Although it’s not for certain yet there’s a lot of information floating around about the Hewlett-Packard company may possibly be building a series of Netbooks off of Google’s free operating system. The Android operating system is being explored by HP but there’s no official word as to if HP will be using it.

Asustek Computer Inc., a competitor of HP, has stated that it may also build a netbook running the Android operating system and Dell Inc. may possibly build a smartphone off of the operating system as well.

It’s still undecided whether the Android operating system will be used on the ARM processor or Intel’s Atom processor. Currently Atom is used on almost all netbooks. The advantage to the Atom processor is that it’s inexpensive and it doesn’t use a lot of power. While the advantage to ARM is that it’s currently working with the Android operating system on smartphones. In fact the ARM processor is currently on more than 10 billion phones and it uses less power and is more cost effective than its competitor.

Hp has a large share of the netbook market ranking in third with Acer and Asustek leading. However, Hp has taken more of an aggressive approach to the netbook market.

Although there is talk of using the Android operating system, HP has no intent of dropping Windows 7. In fact the company plans to ship 3 of the versions of Windows 7 on its netbooks.

Most users have never heard of the Android operating system. However, if released with a company such as HP it can challenge the Microsoft Windows operating system. It will be interesting to see the stability of the free operating system and the functionality that it offers. If all goes well Microsoft Windows may have a decent competitor besides Linux.

Source: Computer World