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Comment by ludoo | Hacker News Reader

If I could find a 12" or 13" Android laptop with a nice screen, good keyboard, no fan, and decent specs I'd use it as my primary machine. Debian kit+console+a decent editor is all I need for work, and for play Android has more and better apps than Ubuntu or any other Linux distro.

It's about time manufecturers started producing them.

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I'd actually like one a bit bigger, like 14" or 15", with touchscreen, and which dual-boots standard Linux and Android, both as first-class citizens (you can usually hack Linux booting via chroots into Android devices, but I'd rather just have the dual-booting supported at the BIOS level with no goofy hacks).

I would buy the hell out of a system like this.

Isn't that (with the exception of "Android") what Chromebooks are?

Actually, I wonder how much effort it would take to get Android userland running on top of ChromeOS. Naively, you could just write a JVM-equivalent for Dalvik (providing the same runtime services to native code.) Or you could just apply a static transformation to the Dalvik executable to turn native syscalls into calls to PPAPI, and call the result an NaCl binary.

Can be done, but a expensive project for sure..

I think the whole thing are pretty messed up..

We shouldnt be choosing between freedom to run whatever we want in our own machines against the convenience of a fat application layer and the apps that are more easilly found in iOS and Android..

We should have both worlds in only one platform.. thats what the industry are having a hard time to figure it out..

I hope when my project are launched, i can make my point more clearly by using a practical implementation to address some really bad scenarios for user and developer freedom. that are coming ahead

Hasn't the Oyua shown that most Android apps are pretty terrible if not used on a touchscreen device? For the features you want, it's going to be comparably priced to a $1000 Surface Pro.

It's debatable whether it's shown that, but it doesn't give us much information about this device even if that's true. The statement that Android apps are terrible on non-touchscreens doesn't necessarily tell us anything about how good they are on touch-capable devices.

The big failures exist in the 3rd-party apps and the home-screen. With a custom home-screen and a secondary app-store full of key/mouse-friendly apps? You could make a comfy Android/Netbook experience.

I think the Oyua has really shown also that games work well with a controller. Many android games are just trying to use the screen to emulate what we're used to (buttons, d-pad, analog sticks, etc)

This is a touchscreen device.

Well there are similar tablets, I think the one below was around $250: http://tabletrepublic.com/forum/android-tablet-reviews/voyo-...

You would have to find a case + keyboard though.

> 'Debian kit+console+a decent editor is all I need for work'

Android only has a Linux kernel, there's no GNU userspace, much less the rest of Debian. Android doesn't have a lot of desktop-style programmers editors.

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