I’ve been thinking of this from the beginning, when Motorola launched both the Atrix with its Webtop Linux companion OS and the Motorola Xoom tablet with Honeycomb. It was pretty clear that Google intended Honeycomb to be more like a desktop OS, while still being touch optimized, of course. And there were few things you would need that would only be available in Linux, rather than Honeycomb.
The Webtop had to run in the same time with Android, and it made things pretty slow. The ARM processors were not, and still aren’t fast enough to replace a mid-range performance laptop, and running 2 OS’s in the same time, was not exactly something very efficient either from a resources point of view. Running the same Android 4.0 when it’s in laptop dock mode (or Webtop mode, as Motorola keeps calling it), is a much better way to do things.
If only Google were a lot more aggressive in getting “tablet apps” for the Android platform, it would also become a lot more apparent that Android could be a Windows competitor one day. Android needs tablet apps badly in order to offer that kind of competitiveness for a full blown OS. It also needs more devices like the Transformer Prime, or more docking options, which in my opinion should be wireless eventually.
The future is all about docking your phone into a big screen when needed and using a physical keyboard to work on it. It’s all about extreme portability and carrying the same OS with you everywhere. The future generation chips like Cortex A15, and in a couple of years, the ARMv8 64 bit architecture will only help speed this up. But Android also needs to become a lot more mature when it comes to having larger landscape applications. So here’s hoping that Google has an actual plan to achieve that in 2012, other than sitting back and waiting for tablet apps to appear.
[Via AndroidAndMe]