Last week, in an interview with Reuters, the president for Dell China and South Asia president, Amit Midha, said “with Chrome or Android or anything like that we want to be one of the leaders.”

The two operating systems (OS) from Google give some exciting new options to netbooks, currently stuck with Windows XP, Windows 7 Starter and Ubuntu.

Microsoft’s offerings are both competent, and importantly for anyone working on the road they obviously run Microsoft Office. There are many people however who think that with a good internet connection available in most urban areas there’s no need to load up a netbook like a mini laptop with programs and rob them of speed.

Ubuntu is an ideal OS; lightweight, well designed and on a full stable release and it’s free to download because it’s open source. Dell also sells several netbooks with Ubuntu. Few people outside of the tech community know about it however, and this image problem hampers take up. It comes with OpenOffice a usable alternative to the Microsoft version.

Google may have the advantage over both Windows and Ubuntu here.

The Chrome OS will only come bundled with hardware, and won’t be available for a free consumer download like Ubuntu, so with Dell, HP and Acer all rumored to be producing Chromed hardware it has the chance to ship millions of units. The products should also be cheaper because it is open source.

Toshiba have already produced a working netbook running the Android OS, and it’s still unclear which one will prove the most popular. An app based OS like Android or the slightly bigger Chrome.

And I say slightly because Chrome OS is going to be pretty Spartan; in fact you’ll probably just get Chrome browser, apps, widgets and a media player. With the entire experience set on putting the net in netbook.

Whether Chrome will be for you is all down to the quality of your internet connection; so good you can taste it then Chrome should be the fastest thing you’ve ever seen, but if it’s sluggish and unreliable then your netbook will be little more than a paperweight.

Image Credit: Wiki Commons