$200 Netbooks on the Horizon?
Wired’s blog reports that Freescale is developing ARM-based netbooks with planned retail prices of about $200:
Freescale is racing to get netbooks out this summer, featuring the company’s chips, that would offer up to eight hours of battery life, be significantly thinner than existing designs and priced under $200.
“We are taking dead aim at the netbook space,” says Glen Burchers, marketing director at Freescale.”The value proposition that Freescale brings is dramatically lower power consumption and even lower prices.”
The price and features should attract great interest from consumers. Even more interesting in terms of computing paradigms is the fact that Windows cannot run on ARM chips, while Linux and Google Android will be perfectly suited for the platform.
Linux is already growing quickly due to pre-installation on netbooks, but Freescale machines will further accelerate its rise, since the temptation to install Windows won’t exist at all due to these technical limitations.