Oracle Corp. chief executive Larry Ellison pledged to use the purchase of Sun Microsystems Inc. as a way to get into the rapidly growing netbook business and develop other electronics gadgets.

Ellison made the comments Tuesday at a Sun conference for users of Java software which he also said could be used on netbooks.

Oracle earlier this year agreed to acquire Sun for $7.4 billion.

I don't see why some of those devices shouldn't come from Sun, Reuters quoted Ellison as saying. There will be computers that are fundamentally based on Java.

We see increased investments in Java coming from the Sun-Oracle combination and an expansion of the overall community and we're very excited about that, Ellison said.

Java was a very attractive platform for us because it was open and it allowed us to extend the platform, he said. Our whole next generation of business applications, something we call the Fusion suite of applications, is built entirely on Java.

We think it's going to be very attractive to our customers and to the community, he added.

Netbooks are considered to be an inexpensive laptop computers designed to connect wirelessly and are used primarily for checking email and browsing the Web.

Meanwhile, Acer said Tuesday it will release a

netbook in the third quarter that will use Google Inc.’s Android operating system instead of Microsoft Windows, which most makers now use.

Software Oracle