Dell has quietly drawn attention to its netbook plans by demonstrating Google's Android 1.5 running on an Inspiron Mini 10v (video below). Company technology strategist Doug Anson describes the mobile OS as "small and snappy" on the Intel Atom-based portable but doesn't do more than show the operating system running on the 10v alongside another system using Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It continues to show the stock home screen and doesn't show signs of customization by Dell.

Anson maintains that Dell doesn't have any "announced" products in the works running Android, though the decision to show Android running would be unusual for a company with no intentions to port Android to its computers. One of Dell's partners has directly claimed that Dell will launch a Mini 9 with Android and will add built-in Flash for the web browser.

Other companies, such as Acer, have experimented with Android and are typically drawn by both the relative ease of use compared to regular Linux distributions as well as the light demand on processing performance and storage compared to desktop operating systems. Android runs on as little as a 200MHz ARM processor, making it particularly responsive on netbook-class chips. [via Pocket-lint]