Unholy Alliance

I’m sure everyone has seen recent press about Nokia coming out with a netbook powered by an Intel CPU. The movement toward a mobile device that does everything a laptop does and also makes a phone call is moving rapidly into reality. You have the largest supplier of CPUs to the PC market hooking up with the largest supplier of handset and the writing is certainly on the wall. I mentioned in previous posts about the future mobile media devices that will be coming into the market in the 2012/14 timeframe and this is the very first step. The Nokia netbook’s OS is Window’s based. Given the CPU supplier this shouldn’t be a surprise. But, given Nokia’s investment both financially and emotionally to Symbian, this seems a bit odd. On top of all the historical issues with anything driven by a Windows OS, this seems to be a strange decision. Yes, I know, software is king and legacy apps are what everyone worries about. But, there are hundreds of Web 2.0 productivity apps that don’t require Windows OS. Think Google Docs. I constantly fight with my PC laptop every day trying to get it to behave like I want it to. It’s a nightmare that I’ve lived for 20 years. (I know I could move to MAC but that’s just not been the corporate culture.)

There is hope, however. There will be ARM-based netbooks that can take full advantage of the Linux OS.  And, since ARM CPUs are in just about every cell phone on the planet, this seem like a much smoother integration path. It's going to be fun to watch how all this shakes out.