"I do think that there is more work that can and will be done to bring the things we love about Android into form factors [such as netbooks]", Kerry McGuire, director of strategic alliances at ARM, told . Android, she acknowledged, is still optimized for smartphones.

Netbooks running the Android platform on an ARM-based chip platform, , are widely expected to pose a major challenge to netbooks running Windows on Intel Corp.'s Atom chips.

Linux-based smartbooks are expected to turn on instantly, and have longer battery life and better wireless connectivity than today's netbooks. ARM chief executive Warren East predicted at the Computex trade show earlier this week that of the market next year.

While Android has the biggest-name backer among Linux distributions potentially running on ARM, it still needs "a lot of work," Rishi Mathew, director of RealPlayer for Mobile Devices at Real Inc. said last week before Computex. "If you look at the [latest] Cupcake release of Android, it's very targeted at smartphones, not a netbook form factor."

Mathew cited the inability of Android to let users run multiple applications at a time, as well as the lack of drivers for plugged-in devices.