Nvidia Chooses Windows CE Over Android on Netbooks

Nvidia Inc. sees more immediate promise in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows CE over Android for ARM-based netbooks because of its maturity compared to Google’s operating system.
Mike Rayfield, general manager for Nvidia’s mobile business unit, said Nvidia preferred Microsoft’s Windows CE over Android because of CE’s maturity. He said Android currently has a rough user interface.
For smartbooks, Nvidia is working with Microsoft to optimize Windows CE when it runs on Tegra. The counterpart to Nvidia’s Ion platform for Intel Atom-based netbooks, Tegra bundles an ARM CPU with specialized chips designed by Nvidia for graphics, HD video encoding and decoding, stereo sound and more.
Nvidia chose to work with Windows CE first, said Rayfield, because it “is a rock-solid operating system that has been shipped billions of times.” Windows CE also has a “low memory footprint and a good collection of apps,” Rayfield said.
Nvidia is working with Google to accelerate Android, which is based on Linux, when running on Tegra hardware. But it will be about a year before that delivers for smartbooks, due to existing limitations in Android, he said.