Acer netbooks to dual-boot between Android and Windows

[Jos]

Earlier this year Acer began showing off a new netbook model, the Aspire One D255, capable of dual-booting between Windows and Android. Although as far as we know the option never became available in the U.S., it seems the company is furthering its commitment with Google’s mobile platform in its native Taiwan, where it reportedly plans to adopt the dual-OS approach to netbooks as a standard on all models sporting a dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor.

The idea is basically to use Android as an Instant-On operating system which can be quickly booted for common tasks, including multimedia, email and browsing, while Windows remains the primary operating system to perform a wider range of tasks. According to Digitimes, Acer is confident such an approach could stimulate demand and also citied figures from Gartner to point out that netbooks will not be replaced by tablet PCs. The company is aiming to ship 40 million notebooks in 2010, with a fourth of them being netbooks.

The company recently announced the dual-core Atom equipped Aspire One D255 will hit U.S. store shelves priced at $330, but as far as we can tell the dual-booting option will not be available in this part of the world for now.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/40572-acer-netbooks-to-dual-boot-between-android-and-windows.html

 

[matrix86]

I would actually like this. Sometimes I boot up just to check email or browse a few websites and I don't have a lot of time. So it would be nice to hit the power button and boom i'm ready to go. But when I need to do some serious work (editing some of my Visual Basic programs, doing some quick video tutorials, watching the occasional movie, or working on documents/presentations) it'd be nice to know I can boot into Windows.

Maybe make it so that when Android is fully booted and ready to go, Windows is slowly booting in the background, so when you're ready to switch, it'll take no time at all...of course it would have to do it so that it doesn't affect the performance of Android. Either that or give you your options of which OS you want to boot into when you hit the power button.

 

[Vicenarian]

I want this.

 

[TorturedChaos]

I agree this looks like a very cool idea. I would like to see it setup tho so that if you load into the Android OS, you could easily switch to Windows w/o having to restart the netbook. Maybe vise-versa too, but I think the Android to Windows more be more useful.

 

[Burty117]

matrix86 said:
I would actually like this. Sometimes I boot up just to check email or browse a few websites and I don't have a lot of time. So it would be nice to hit the power button and boom i'm ready to go. But when I need to do some serious work (editing some of my Visual Basic programs, doing some quick video tutorials, watching the occasional movie, or working on documents/presentations) it'd be nice to know I can boot into Windows.

Maybe make it so that when Android is fully booted and ready to go, Windows is slowly booting in the background, so when you're ready to switch, it'll take no time at all...of course it would have to do it so that it doesn't affect the performance of Android. Either that or give you your options of which OS you want to boot into when you hit the power button.

You Probably could do this with a very Light Linux Kernal and then a VMWare layer on top which then starts loading both OS's on power up but puts most power towards Android first and loads straight into that then an overlay appears to say "Windows is ready for you to logon".

that would be very cool indeed

 

[Flannelwarrior]

I am waiting for Chrome OS. But this is an exciting step in the right direction (open source software takeover).

 

[Guest]

why would you need 2 OS´S when you just can hibernate windows 7, it takes about 6 sec to start up