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ANDROID as OS for PC or notebooks ???
- Thread starter game14
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Isn't this what a Chromebook is?
There are tablets like the Dell Venue 8 runs android while the same hardware runs Windows 8.1 as the Dell Venue 8 PRO.
I would suspect as long as drivers are available it would work.
Android is written to run on phone/tablet hardware, do not see advantage of using on much better hardware.
There are tablets like the Dell Venue 8 runs android while the same hardware runs Windows 8.1 as the Dell Venue 8 PRO.
I would suspect as long as drivers are available it would work.
Android is written to run on phone/tablet hardware, do not see advantage of using on much better hardware.
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B00nie
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Yep Chromebooks have been quite a failure. Just way too limited.
kirbyrj
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/2454282/chromebook-sales-explode-in-the-workplace.html
Your definition of failure leaves something to be desired.
well every OS is limited in one way or another, always depends on what you gonna use it for. If i could run android on a small computer (some old hardware thats collecting dust), the kids could play their favorite games and then maybe i get my phone back...
Tsumi
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Old hardware is significantly less likely to have drivers on Android.
B00nie
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Smells like a paid article. Chromebooks have all the same limitations on them like linux computers, how all of the sudden you get by without having your windows apps?
I don't know anyone who would own a chromebook and I've never seen a single chromebook at our customers. Also, nobody has asked if our software runs on Chromebook. OSX and linux yes, not for chromebook/Android.
B00nie
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well every OS is limited in one way or another, always depends on what you gonna use it for. If i could run android on a small computer (some old hardware thats collecting dust), the kids could play their favorite games and then maybe i get my phone back...
Or you could just get them their own phones. I consider a phone as a security measure. How else is your kid going to call for help if something bad is about to happen or happening?
Just recently there was a case where a 12-year old girl was kidnapped and taken to a remote cabin in the wilderness for later exploitation. She managed to free her hand from the ties and called the emergency number. The police located her phone and released her in a couple of hours and just sat waiting for the kidnapper to return.
sure if they are old enough they get their own phones. But im talking about my 3 and 5 years old, maybe should have mentioned that. They know how to play simple games, listen to music, watching videos ... and srewing up the phone settings or locking my sim card.
Well what i got in my mind is a simple computer that runs android games with a simple mouse click, plays videos and music and connects to facebook (that my wifes entertainment).
Just a GUI with big huge icons to click on, similar to a phone.
Hardware is a motherboard with Intel chipset, kinda G41 i think. Cpu is an E3200. 2g of ram.
Well what i got in my mind is a simple computer that runs android games with a simple mouse click, plays videos and music and connects to facebook (that my wifes entertainment).
Just a GUI with big huge icons to click on, similar to a phone.
Hardware is a motherboard with Intel chipset, kinda G41 i think. Cpu is an E3200. 2g of ram.
drescherjm
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No way to make a custom kernel utilizing its linux roots?
kirbyrj
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Because Windows apps aren't the be all, end all of everyone's life. With Office 365 and a host of other online hosted applications some people only need a web browser.
If you're going to sit there and seriously argue that Chromebooks don't sell, you're going to look like an ostrich with its head in the sand.
http://www.eweek.com/cloud/chromebook-sales-thanks-to-schools-to-grow-79-percent-in-2014.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation...ales-spike.-Is-it-still-a-niche-product-video
http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-devices/chromebook-sales-surge/d/d-id/1297921
http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/08/chromebook-sales-2014.html
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
Just because YOU haven't seen one doesn't mean they aren't popular.
burritoincognito
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The reason I run my Chromebook (Acer C720) is because, for $180, it gives me 8 hours of battery life, and lets me use Chrome. It's not a replacement to my Mac or my gaming PC. It's something to use while I'm sitting on the couch or on the toilet. I've run Linux, OSX, and Windows, and in the end, I spend most of my time not doing work or gaming in Chrome, which runs on all of them.
The company I work for recently purchased 15 Acer C720s for sales school so they could take notes if they didn't have their laptop. We're also looking at buying over 200 Chromeboxes for the shop.
Why?
We're currently rolling out NUC PCs at the cost of the i3 unit, a 4GB stick of RAM, a 60GB SSD, and a Windows 8.1 Pro license all to run Chrome, a touchscreen, and Bluetooth scanner. The Chromeboxes can do the same thing, at 1/2 to 1/3 the price.
We'll lose AD integration, but we'll also have to buy that many fewer licenses of the OS, antivirus, we don't have to worry about security updates, etc. We can manage the users through wireless network policies, connecting them to a network that only allows intranet access, and there's nothing to really worry about locking them out of.
The rollout time per machine drops from a couple hours to configure everything to 15 minutes. Think of how many thousands of dollars are being saved between hardware/software costs and man-hours for deployment. Or rather, think how many are being wasted by running a full OS when all we need is a web browser to input data on.
B00nie
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So you're using chromebooks for tasks that are more commonly handled by tablets.
B00nie
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So according to your articles schools are buying chromebooks due to their low price. Yeah, that must mean that everyone is all of the sudden dropping macs and pcs and settling for a niche product. Busineses will never adopt chromebooks for the same reasons that they never adopted linux computers. Not to mention that any chromebook user is data harvested by Google, that alone is a liability for any larger company.
kirbyrj
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So burritoincognito's business experience doesn't count?
Yakk
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Manufacturers of Chromebooks like Dell are reporting delays as they can't meet the demand for Chromebooks.
You can "Google" it.
You can "Google" it.
burritoincognito
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Me personally, yes. I actually sold my Nexus 7 2013 32GB because this did a better job at 80% of what I did with my tablet, and my Nexus 5 can pick up the other slack, as that 20% was 90% games and 10% other apps.
The Chromebooks at work actually are replacing 50 Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7s that were given to us by Sprint (well, it actually came free with the 2 year contract, and buying that many actually dropped our phone plan, so them sitting unused in the box is still a gain)...but those tablets are absolute junk.
The Chromeboxes couldn't be replaced by an Android or iOS tablet. A Windows tablet, poorly, but you'd need a USB hub for a full size keyboard, mouse, scanner. They tried that with about 10 Latitude 10 ST-2e tablets, but Atom is slow as hell. We do use Android tablets to scan in some things, but not in the location where the Chromeboxes will go. iOS is not present inside the company except for two iPads Retina Minis, and those are circumstances where the users name is on the side of the building.
Incidentally, Linux machines were looked into, which drops the price per machine from three times to twice the amount vs. the Chromebox, and it doesn't benefit from the 15 minute setup time per machine. It also throws in other issues that have to be resolved, like locking the user out of making any configuration changes, management, and most importantly, support of a new OS by the help desk techs. There's very little to manage or support on the ChromeOS side.
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The best feature of Chromebooks is that you can install Linux on most of them. I've been tempted by the $200-ish Haswell-based Celeron models several times.
I'm not sure why someone would want Android on the desktop, other than possibly app compatibility for particular apps. A better argument can be made to expand the capabilities of Android tablets when used in a different role. For example, when plugging it into input devices and possibly a monitor, it could work more like Chrome OS or a more general Linux desktop system. That would be great for productivity, at least with higher end Android devices (to make the experience bearable).
I've been tempted by the $200-ish Haswell-based Celeron models several times.I'm not sure why someone would want Android on the desktop, other than possibly app compatibility for particular apps. A better argument can be made to expand the capabilities of Android tablets when used in a different role. For example, when plugging it into input devices and possibly a monitor, it could work more like Chrome OS or a more general Linux desktop system. That would be great for productivity, at least with higher end Android devices (to make the experience bearable).
All of that only works if you have google apps for business to manage those chromebooks. That's another cost per user to setup. So doesn't that negate some of those savings? The ease of setup does sound appealing, and is much simpler than setting up a windows box. But I feel that even with Chrome, it's another system that has to be integrated to the current AD and needs it's own setting up before the quick 15 minutes can be taken advantage of.
limitedaccess
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Those use the last generation z2760 I believe? But have you tried current gen Atom devices?
Current Atom (BayTrail) has more than double the single threaded performance while having 4 physical cores vs. 2 with hyperthreading, so multi-threaded performance is tripled or more. GPU performance is also tripled or more as well.
burritoincognito
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We have replaced the ST2e with Venue 11 Pros for our quality control users around the country. They're certainly faster, but that wouldn't solve the problems.
CrimsonKnight13
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To get back on topic with your question, it's definitely possible to run Android on PCs.
There's an upcoming implementation that should allow for better support of using Android on PCs. (Console OS)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mmv/console-os-dual-boot-android-remastered-for-the-pc
There is also a current, working distro. It's been recently updated & might work with more hardware than previous releases. This is simply named Android x86.
http://www.android-x86.org/
B00nie
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I'm fairly sure that the advantages of chromebooks will be far outweighed by their disadvantages. The people who made the decisions will just have to bite the bullet when the problems start arising.
I can't imagine a chromebook as a work tool for anyone but extremely light business user. Someone who could get away with a notebook and a pen basically
Tsumi
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Fairly sure there is a way. But not being a dev, and not having taken any CS classes besides basic C++ ones, I'm not sure of the difficulty, though, given what I've seen on custom OS for phones, custom kernels are quite difficult to make. The less similar the hardware to what the original system was designed for, the harder it is.
B00nie
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I have a friend whose son develops games for Android. He said his son is cursing Android to the lowest bottom of hell regularly due to the platform fragmentation it has. Just too many versions and hardware platforms that needs supporting. Developer nightmare. The worst thing is that kernels are device dependent. You're at the mercy of the OEM if you ever get an update or not. Most don't.
most people i know dont keep there phone or tablet for longer than a year...so why should they be concerned about OS updates.
B00nie
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The preowned phones go somewhere so it's their concern. And the developers concern.
Phones are generally on a 2 year cycle due to contracts, but not tablets. The iPad 2 is still the most heavily used Apple tablet by a good margin:
It launched with iOS 4 and it's about to get iOS 8 next week.
More on-topic, Google just released a beta of the Android interpreter for ChromeOS, so a Chromebook can run a handful of Android apps and should be able to run many more by the end of the year. IMO, this is even better than running Android as the main OS on a laptop since ChromeOS is much better suited to a mouse and keyboard than Android is.
kirbyrj
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iPad mini = iPad2 also...so you're talking about almost 50% of the iPad market.
wonderfield
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Which probably ends up being a fairly large swath of the white collar workforce. Apart from the use of one application tying us to Windows, we could fairly easily migrate entirely to Chrome OS. At this time, I could move at least two users to Chromeboxes, with myself and the remaining users remaining on Windows PCs until we can completely retire that one application.I can't imagine a chromebook as a work tool for anyone but extremely light business user. Someone who could get away with a notebook and a pen basically
I'm not suggesting that's what we're going to do, but it's a possibility. Machines loaded with Windows with Bing make that a somewhat harder sell from a cost perspective, but there are some interesting advantages that Chrome OS brings to the table in terms of security versus Windows.
B00nie
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But why not plain linux? Why do you need to stream everything you do to Google? I wouldn't want to do that.
/dev/null
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Best selling laptop on Amazon no?
I'm typing from one & I love it.
When I just want to dork around on the web, I use ChromeOS. When I want to actually do _WORK_ I boot off my 32GB SD card into Xubuntu 14.10. It's fairly fast & useable.
Only downside is the 4G LTE modem doesn't work in Linux. My work provides me an ip5 with tethering & 5G data/month so it doesn't matter too much.
I paid $300 and the build quality is phenomenal. Battery life is about 7 hours on my HP 14" while surfing.
B00nie
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But you can't do much anything else than surf on it. I fail to see the attraction. If I want linux I'll use linux, if I want stuff to just work I use a mac. If I want to play games I use Windows. If I want to check recipes when cooking I'll use the iPad. I don't see any use for a chromebook.
Yes, it is fully possible to run Android on a PC. As a matter of fact I have Android running on an old Toshiba netbook. There are some good things and some bad things with using it though. For one, it is quite nice to have an Android system running with a 500GB hard drive. There's plenty of room for movies and music. Android seems to adapt pretty well for use with a keyboard and trackpad. Using libhoudini as an ARM translation helps with running ARM apps on the x86 system. This leads me to some of the problems.
Android is definitely meant to be used with a touchscreen. Many apps you can get away with a mouse/trackpad, but many apps are not very good or even usable at all. This is especially true with many games. Also, is driver support. Initially my netbook's fan would not run resulting in the thing overheating pretty badly after a bit of use. The best I could do was a hack to make the fan run all the time, which can get annoying. Another thing, which is more of an issue with Android itself, is running every app as full screen. It's not so bad on something like a netbook where you have a small screen with little expectation of doing more than one thing at a time, but I can imagine it could get very annoying very quickly on desktop class hardware.
I'm not going to go into the weeds with "why" or "why not". I'm just saying that it is very possible to run Android on a notebook/desktop and if you are serious about the topic try http://www.android-x86.org/ or just spend a few minutes on google to find out how to install it.
Android is definitely meant to be used with a touchscreen. Many apps you can get away with a mouse/trackpad, but many apps are not very good or even usable at all. This is especially true with many games. Also, is driver support. Initially my netbook's fan would not run resulting in the thing overheating pretty badly after a bit of use. The best I could do was a hack to make the fan run all the time, which can get annoying. Another thing, which is more of an issue with Android itself, is running every app as full screen. It's not so bad on something like a netbook where you have a small screen with little expectation of doing more than one thing at a time, but I can imagine it could get very annoying very quickly on desktop class hardware.
I'm not going to go into the weeds with "why" or "why not". I'm just saying that it is very possible to run Android on a notebook/desktop and if you are serious about the topic try http://www.android-x86.org/ or just spend a few minutes on google to find out how to install it.
/dev/null
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If you read my whole post, you'll see I run Linux on it
In general you can't approach the build quality in (at least my) chromebook for $300 with any win, mac, or linux laptop.
B00nie
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If you read my whole post, you'll see I run Linux on it
Ok missed that part. But is it fast enough?
I might get one to try it out just for giggles if its not going to crawl down just by looking at it.
kirbyrj
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Most of the recent Chromebooks use the Haswell Celeron dual core. Not a speed demon by any stretch, but somewhat faster than the Baytrail chips in tablets and other low end notebooks.
PornoSatan
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Actually it probably does. If you go to a college campus and see all Windows / Mac / Android / iOS devices and never a Chromebook, pretty safe to say they aren't popular.