TAIPEI: Acer Inc, the world's No 3 PC brand, plans to sell netbook PCs that run on Google's Android operating system, posing a potential threat to Microsoft's dominance over PC operating systems.

Acer was the first PC vendor to announce that it planned to build Android PCs. The announcement came yesterday, weeks after Acer said it was entering the smartphone market using the same Google-developed platform, later in 2009.

"Today's netbooks are not close to perfection at all. In two years, it will all be very different," Jim Wong, Acer's global president for IT products, told a news conference at Computex, the world's second-largest PC trade show held in Taipei.

"If we do not continue to change our mobile Internet devices, consumers may not choose them any more."

Wang declined to give any shipment targets or prices for the Android netbooks, which will run on Intel's low-cost, low-performance Atom processor. He added however, the company would continue to ship netbooks loaded with the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Netbooks are stripped-down PCs optimised for surfing the Internet. They usually cost around $300. A computer running on Android could be cheaper as analysts have previously said PC brands pay about $25 to install Windows XP into each netbook.

Android could cost less as its open source nature means developers and brands are free to use it and change it to suit their own needs.

"When we are doing this new Android netbook, we are not going to make the other one go away," Wong said. "Both systems will still remain available to customers, and one will not go away because of the other."

Analysts said it was still too early to say whether Android poses a genuine threat to the dominance of the Windows operating system in the PC world. They pointed to an absence of software and applications that support Android.

"We'll still have to see what kind of applications the Android software can run and how stable it'll be," said Vincent Chen, an analyst at Yuanta Securities.

Android, an open-source software developed for mobile phones, was first used by HTCin its smartphones, but many PC brands, such as netbook pioneer Asustek, have expressed interest in using Android in its netbook computers.

Reuters

(HK Edition 06/03/2009 page2)