Android on the desktop!
Though Android dominates the smartphone market and has a very strong position in tablets, until now Google’s OS platform was not available for desktops and conventional notebooks (the Chromebook with its limited offline functionality doesn’t really count).
That has now changed with the new HP SlateBook, a full-function, quad-core Tegra 4-powered notebook with a 14-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel 10-point multi-touch screen, and running Android 4.3. The Slatebook weighs 3.7 pounds, offers up to 9 hours of battery life from its 32 Watt-Hour battery, has USB 3.0 and HDMI ports, 16GB of eMMC storage, a full-size keyboard, and starts at US$429.
The HP SlateBook is not a rugged product, but its arrival will almost certainly have an impact on the rugged computing industry. In fact, I believe that Android availability on desktops and laptops may change everything.
Think about it: While Microsoft continues to dominate the desktop and laptop, Redmond’s presence in tablets is mostly limited to industrial and enterprise products. And while Windows CE and Windows Mobile/Embedded Handheld have managed to hang on in industrial handhelds for years longer than anyone expected, the handwriting is on the wall there, too. Between not having any upgrade or migration path between WinCE/WinMobile and Windows Phone, and Windows Phone itself just a distant also-ran in smartphones, we’d be very surprised to see any sort of dominant Microsoft presence on industrial handhelds in the future.
One of the primary reasons why WinCE/WinMobile managed to hang around for so long was the leverage argument: enterprise runs Microsoft and enterprise IT knows Microsoft, so using Microsoft on handhelds means easier integration and less development and training costs. But with all of those hundreds of millions of iOS and Android tablets and smartphones, even Microsoft-based enterprise quickly learned to work with them and integrate them, so the leverage argument isn’t what it used to be.
On the desktop side, it will forever be unclear to me what drove Microsoft to craft Windows 8 as a dual-personality system with the largely useless (for now anyway) metro interface and a crippled legacy desktop that made no one happy. The 8.1 upgrade fixed a few of the worst ideas, but even as a face-saving retreat it was too little to address the basic structural problems. And whatever surfaces as Windows 9 will still have the unenviable task of seeking to perpetuate Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop where most people still work, while watching the world go ever more mobile, on non-Microsoft platforms.
I think that by far Microsoft’s strongest argument is that a mouse-operated windowed multi-tasking environment on a large display remains superior for creative and office work to finger-tapping on a tablet. I think the Office argument isn’t nearly as strong. Sure, Office has a virtual monopoly in the classic office apps, but perhaps 90% of its functionality is available from numerous other sources. Even as a journalist, writer and publisher I rarely use more than the barest minimum of Office’s myriad of functions.
And though at RuggedPCReview.com we’re OS-agnostic, by far our platform of choice is the Mac. The painless OS upgrades alone would be enough to pick Apple, but what really clenches the deal is that when you get a brand-new Mac, you simply hook the Time Machine backup from your old one up to it and transfer everything to the new one, apps, data, settings and all. The next morning, whatever was on the old Mac is on the new one. No fuss at all. That is simply not possible with Microsoft.
Anyway, I often thought how nice it’d be to load Android on some of the numerous old Windows machines in the office that we can no longer use because the Microsoft OS on them is no longer supported or — worse — the system decided it was now pirated because we put in a new disk or processor. I thought how nice it’d be to have Android on the desktop or a good notebook for those times when you simply do need the pin-point precision of a mouse, the solidity of a real desktop keyboard, the comfort of a real desk and office chair, or the ability to see everything on a big 27-inch screen.
Or how nice it’d be to have exactly the same OS on such a big, comfortable, productive machine as well as on a handy tablet or a smartphone. I’d use that in a heartbeat.
There are, of course, questions. Microsoft itself has wrestled for decades with ways to provide a unified Windows experience on various platforms, and almost all those attempts failed. Apple didn’t fall into the one-OS-for-all-devices trap and instead chose to optimize the user interface to the platform’s physical characteristics. But that came at the cost of a rather weak connection between the Mac OS and iOS (why Apple doesn’t get more criticism for iTunes and Cloud has always been beyond me). And even if Android were to emerge, full-blown, on laptops and desktops, we’d soon miss having multiple windows open. I mean, flipping between full-screen apps might have been acceptable back in the late 1980s, but going back to that would be a giant leap into the past.
Still, if full Android were available for desktops today, I’d drop everything I was doing to install it on several on the system in our office right this instance. And I am pretty certain that full Android availability on desktops and laptops would mean a massive renaissance for those currently beleaguered platforms.
So the release of HP’s Android SlateBook just may be a milestone event.