At the most recent COMPUTEX, there was a chorus of buzz generated by Qualcomm, Acer, and ASUS around the possibility of using Google Android as a netbook OS. Qualcomm and ASUS in particular were talking up Android as an OS for so-called “smartbooks,” which are netbooks that use ARM processors instead of Intel’s Atom, whereas Acer seemed to be looking to an x86 port of Android so that it could run the OS on Atom-based netbooks.

Today’s publication of a partial list of hardware partners (Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba) for the newly announced Google Chrome OS—a list that features all three of the aforementioned companies, plus other ARM players—adds some color to the picture of those companies’ netbook and smartbook plans. In particular, it seems likely that Chrome will be emerge as the smartbook OS of choice, and as a complement to (not a replacement for) Windows on netbooks.

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