Last week’s Google Chrome OS announcement doesn’t seem to be impacting prior plans for Android netbooks. DigiTimes indicates that Acer is still planning to launch a dual-boot netbook that offers both Microsoft Windows XP and Google Android. I don’t envision any cost difference between an XP/Android netbook and an XP-only device — the cost of a Windows XP license has to be paid in both cases. So there’s no benefit in terms of cost, but there is a value-add in having another operating system for those that want it. Or is there?

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Vodafone UK’s latest netbook deal highlights two main differences between the European and American markets. Here we haven’t seen many high-end subsidized netbooks bundled with broadband service. Typically, the deals here include a base model from HP. I’ve called for more choice if we’re going to subsidize netbooks here. In fact, one of the brands I mentioned in that point was Samsung. That’s the brand that Vodafone UK is offering for free. It’s your basic netbook, but the NC10 does offer excellent battery life — upwards of six to seven hours. Just beating out Sprint’s (s) 99-cent deal, this Samsung NC10 is fully subsidized and free, provided you pair it with a two-year data plan. And that illustrates the second difference.

Vodafone UK gives customers two options to gain a free netbook. Both are two-year deals, just like we see here in the U.S. The difference is in the two tiers of pricing and throughput. For a free NC10 netbook, customers can pay 25 pounds ($40.26) a month for 1GB of data or 30 pounds a month for 3GB. We have two tiers here as well, but most folks opt for the second because the first is woefully inadequate. For $39.99 a month, we can nab between 200MB and 250MB a month, depending on the carrier. We can opt for that small sip or we can gulp a 5GB cap for $59.99 a month. There is no in between, and for most folks, it simply makes sense to pay the extra $20 for up to 25 times more monthly throughput.

Not only does the EU have my beloved Tour de France, but it has better mobile broadband deals as well. I think I’m going to move.

Microsoft today announced the start of the Office 2010 preview program. A new, larger group will get to start playing with the next major version of the Office suite next month. This announcement is not a surprise and was widely expected to be made today. The news was accompanied by even more information about the online version of Office, the Office Web Apps. This online version is aimed at competing with Google Docs, Zoho and others. Like most online apps, the Office Web Apps are designed to be run from the cloud, completely in a user’s web browser. The “app in a browser” function of Office Web Apps may make future Google Chrome OS users the big winners, given the timing of both products for next year.

Office Web Apps will be free to Windows Live users, which is hardly surprising given the free nature of Google Docs. The online storage will be supplied by SkyDrive, and Microsoft is not forthcoming on if the apps will be ad-supported. Office Web Apps will be lightweight versions of their full Office suite siblings, and will consist of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The inclusion of an online version of OneNote is exciting, and may offer Microsoft a way to compete with Evernote. Evernote has taken the online notetaking world by storm of late.

While many webworkers and the like have been moving to the cloud in greater numbers, the big winners of the appearance next year of Office Web Apps may ironically be Google Chrome OS users. Chrome OS will no doubt be written to work seamlessly with Google Docs, but the strength of Office in the enterprise cannot be overlooked. It is logical to expect documents created with Office Web Apps to be pretty compatible with the full versions. This could give Office an advantage over Google Docs, something users of the forthcoming Chrome OS could use to their benefit.

It will be interesting to see how Office Web Apps plays out, as far as compatibility with non-Microsoft web browsers is concerned. The online apps will certainly be written to best support Internet Explorer users, but Firefox is now mainstream, so it will likely work fine, too. The Google Chrome browser is a wild card with regards to Microsoft support, as this interview makes clear, so it may face a bumpy road when working with Office Web Apps. Microsoft may have to take some pains to ensure the Web Apps are compatible with Google Chrome, however, to avoid the typical cries of “foul”.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble has posted a number of videos of Office 2010 in action. The last video demonstrates Office Web Apps, and the Microsoft product manager states that they will work in IE, Firefox and Safari.

Lenovo was kind enough to send me two of its most current netbook models, and this video is a tour of both. The S10-2 is as small as netbooks go while retaining full usability, in my view, and the S12 pushes the limits of netbooks with a 12-inch screen.

The video gives an overview of both netbooks and shows the size comparison of the two models. This gives a glimpse into how little additional size and weight you gain with the larger S12. The higher screen resolution of the S12 (1280×800) is a nice benefit for such a small size penalty over the S10-2.

The S10-2 is $350 and the S12 is $499 from Lenovo, so the extra size and screen resolution come at a price.

This afternoon I had the pleasure of being a guest on Randall Bennett’s TechVi video show. I worked with Randall back in the old AOL/Weblogs days, and I enjoy talking tech with him. TechVi uses a two-guest format, so I always get to chat with new folks in this space. Today it was Ross Rubin from The NPD Group, whom I generally only see once a year at CES. Besides being an analyst at The NPD Group, Ross authors the weekly “Switched On” column for Engadget.

Today’s chat was focused on Google’s Chrome OS announcement, but not from a nuts-and-bolts standpoint. Since details are scarce on how Chrome OS will actually work, Randall focused today’s TechVi show on the business side of the news. We briefly tackled questions on the impact to Google’s search efforts and on whether or not the creation of Chrome OS would be a distraction to Google as it grows its business. It was a fun experience as always, and I’m appreciative that Randall offered me the opportunity. You can catch the seven-minute spot right here on TechVi to see and hear how Ross and I view the Google Chrome OS news.

The timing of this news is quite ironic, but Appmodo reports that AT&T will charge $55 extra to tether an iPhone to a laptop for modem use. The irony is that I just used the service on my iPhone 3GS and we’ve had some good debate and commentary on what, if anything, this should cost. With the adamant “$55 extra” claim, two words come immediately to my mind: no way.

Let’s think about this for a second. Folks who would likely want, need or use such a feature probably already have an idea of what 3G data plans do or should cost.

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My daily check of the Palm Pre App Catalog didn’t turn up any new software, but there is a notable update today. I’ve been using the Tweed Twitter client, but for now I’m switching over to Spaz. The latest update, version 0.5, adds support for photo posting to TweetPhoto, yfrog, Twitgoo and TwitPic.

I tested the new function, and it worked fine, although it’s not exactly a native feature within the client. Instead, Spaz relies on sending an email to the Twitter photo services: Your text appears as the tweet, while the attached photo receives its own URL. I’d prefer a solution that works within the actual client, but the Pre’s easy-to-use multitasking allows this approach to work effectively.

Nokia’s affair with Symbian has been a long one, spanning the company’s reach from feature phone to smartphone. The phone platform had different variants, with S60 becoming the one garnering most of the innovation and advances as Nokia entered the smartphone market. Nokia spun Symbian off into its own entity awhile back and made the platform open source, no doubt to get developers onboard. Now it appears that Nokia and the Symbian Foundation have quietly closed the books on S60 as recent blog posts indicate.

The web site at S60.com has been shuttered as the box above indicates, as Nokia moves to get the platform more clearly identified. The “new” platform will be known as Symbian ^2 (the ^ is silent) and Symbian ^3, according to packets given to developers. The Symbian system will be updated twice annually going forward, and all development will be concentrated on the new Symbian system. This is no doubt due to the reputation that S60 had garnered as an outdated smartphone platform when compared with WebOS and Android.

Although Gartner predicts a 4 percent drop in mobile device sales this year, that won’t stop the LBS train from steaming up the tracks. Gartner expects the subscriber base for location-based services to more than double in 2009, growing to 95.7 million this year from 41 million people in 2008. The same trend holds true for LBS revenues, as shown by the Gartner chart. I would have thought that location apps and services would be held up by the need for a GPS radio in devices, but alternative methods can work just as well. Wi-Fi triangulation may actually have more of an impact on this market than GPS, since Wi-Fi radios are essentially standard fare in most mobile devices today.

Gartner found regional differences in what LBS is used for as well. Here in North America, the carriers are eager to sell revenue-adding navigational services, making that and family safety solutions the common LBS uses. Navigation is key in Western Europe as well, but folks there don’t seem to track their kids with a cellular phone as some do here. Japan is home to local searching and friend finders. With the population so dense in some urban areas there, that makes sense. It’s also totally different from my local area. I wonder if the cows wear GPS tags?

I actually see those cows during my running activities, and while they may not have a GPS tag, I do. I’m testing RunKeeper Pro, an iPhone application that uses the GPS radio in my phone to track my run. Here’s a screenshot from an easy 5k earlier this week, in preparation for a 5k race this evening. Aside from basic tracking, the GPS functionality offers pace, elevation, distance and more. And since we’re dealing with GPS data, it’s drop-dead easy to view my route on a map. I’ll have more to say on the app later, but for now, I’m using LBS more each day. What LBS apps are you using on a regular basis?

There must be some tech news today that doesn’t involve the Google Chrome OS announcement, but if there is, I can’t find it. The big news from Google and the upcoming new OS for netbooks is generating a lot of tongue wagging, but more importantly it is provoking a lot of thought. There are many ramifications about a Google Chrome OS that will continue to pop up over time and one of them has hit me right between the eyes: smartbooks. Those are the net-centric notebooks running ARM processors that were a hot item at the recent COMPUTEX trade show. Many of the prototype smartbooks being shown at COMPUTEX were running Android but now I’m thinking that likely won’t happen.

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