Although I have been on vacation the last two weeks, I did take the time to view VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai's hour-long video about Google's Chrome OS November 19th 2009 announcing it as an open-source project. Since I recently bought a laptop (really a high-end netbook) and am in the market for a new cell phone I was interested to see this slide:
My new laptop has GPS and broadband in addition to Wi-Fi, making it feel a bit like a phone (and of course you need a phone number to access the broadband). I'm not too excited about paying $30-$50/month for a broadband connection for every portable device I have, though.
Before watching the video I was a bit confused about the relationship between Google's Android operating system on phones and the Chrome OS. Chrome OS (the name is really Chromium OS when you get to the developer site) is an attempt to create an OS whose sole purpose is to support the Chrome browser. The idea is that everything you do through a Chrome OS machine happens in the cloud though a browser window. Any local memory is just there as a cache. It's probably a little ahead of its time, but there are a lot of advantages to working this way. With its extra battery pack my laptop is good for 10+ hours (and still well under three pounds), so the hardware to do what they want is certainly getting here, and I find myself working in 'the cloud' more and more.
Right now there is little or no relationship between Chrome OS and Android, although you can see them merging in the future. Android is a fairly conventional approach to managing a phone, while Chrome OS is trying to do something quite different, and Google is in a good position to make something like this work.
I still don't know what phone to pick, though.
--Th
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