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For all its popularity with users and operators, the netbook is still an immature product category and the main software platforms all have their challenges in supporting it effectively.

The low power, low cost potential of an ARM/Linux alternative to the traditional Intel/Windows combination has been much touted, but so far Linux netbook users have reported higher levels of performance problems than their Windows counterparts, while ARM is reportedly struggling with high performance video. Now Microsoft itself says it will limit the capabilities of its upcoming Windows 7 to make it effective on netbooks, and step up the defences against Linux-based systems like Android, while Symbian is trying to join the game, demonstrating its operating system on Intel Atom.

Microsoft has confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that it will offer a Starter Edition of Windows 7 for netbooks, that will support reduced functionality - or will be "crippled", according to many critics of the move - in return for lower power, lower cost and perhaps faster boot-up. The main trade-off will be that Microsoft will artificially limit the number of simultaneous applications that users can run, to just three.

The move is partly designed to come closer to Linux' speed and power advantages on resource constrained platforms, but is also connected to Microsoft's pricing structures. It needs to differentiate the netbook version of Windows from the full-blown iteration, in order to preserve its margins - it makes about $15 on a copy of XP on a netbook, but $50 to $60 on Vista for a full PC. Windows 7 could command similar or higher prices, but this would be unaffordable on a netbook, especially when competing with free open source Linux.

While Microsoft still gets half its operating profit from Windows, Nokia of course has sacrificed operating system revenues for the chance to make Symbian universal by open sourcing it. However, arch-rival Android has been faster to move beyond the smartphone and into other mobile devices like netbooks, and Symbian is only just catching up. The truce between Nokia and Qualcomm has been important - the companies showed Symbian running on the latter's Snapdragon netbook processor earlier this year - and now the Symbian Foundation has compiled the OS via the open source GNU GCC compiler and run it on an unmodified Atom-based processor. Observers said the speed of the user interface and application load times were "impressive".

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