With all the announcements of phones and Smartbooks based on Android I tend to take a ‘believe it when I see it attitude’. Only yesterday, Asustek put their Android Eee PC “on the backburner” because the technology is “not mature”.

Although Android is licence free, hardware vendors are realising that a free OS is only part of the equation. Android doesn’t have board level reference designs and there are no established companies yet that specialise in the hardware and software skills required to get Android running on arbitrary hardware. Furthermore, there’s no easy (published) way to partner with Google to get the full set of Google applications on your target hardware.

In summary, the ecosystem is still young. Even though the OS is free, it currently takes a lot of effort and hence cost to create a new Android phone or Smartbook.

Update: Someone pointed me to VisionMobile who say something similar but in a lot more detail.