OStatic

Wow, could the world of open source mobile operating systems possibly become more fragmented? Yesterday, we noted that at this week's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) conference in San Francisco notebooks running on the open source Moblin OS are due to arrive, and Intel officials demonstrated a smartphone with an Atom chip running Moblin. Moblin will join Google's upcoming Chrome OS and Ubuntu in the fight to keep open source operating systems competitive on netbooks, and Intel's phone demo based on an open source OS represents the company's first foray into chips and platform technology for smartphones. Moblin/Intel phones may soon be competing with Android phones, and phones based on the upcoming open source version of Symbian's OS.

Following Google's announcement of its Chrome OS, which will arrive in late 2010 and is headed for netbooks, most reactions around the web are positive. There are some who say it has an ice cube's chance in Hell of succeeding, some who say it could be a geeks-only phenomenon, and we've provided our assessment of the mixed chances that Chrome OS has. There's no question that it is attracting interest from hardware developers and others, though. As a blog post from Google and IDG News Service report, Hewlett-Packard (the number one PC maker), Acer and Asus--all big players in the netbook arena--are among early Chrome OS partners.?