I recently had a very interesting talk with Freescale’s Glen Burchers, director of global consumer marketing, regarding netbooks, where Linux stands with this emerging form factor and what we can expect to see as everybody and their grandma pushes innovation of these devices. From Freescale’s perspective, and from a Linux fan’s, the future looks nice: thinner, cheaper netbooks, many of which will be based on Linux, that run as long as eight hours on a charge. Freescale this week announced its intentions to enter the netbook market with new, ARM-based netbook technology to deliver better battery life and other features for less than $200.

Burchers did discuss some issues that remain with Linux, which even among younger users can be viewed as a ‘toy.’ Perhaps it doesn’t help that the popular Linux-based EeePC netbook is sold at Toys’R'Us, but as I pointed out recently, the toy store has the right idea in labeling the netbooks with ‘Linux’ (which is more than I can say for Dell, which sticks to ‘Ubuntu’). Still, I think that Windows XP runs just as much risk of being viewed as ‘my parents’ OS,’ which would certainly be worse than a toy.

One of the things Freescale’s Burchers stressed was thinner netbooks (15mm or less).

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