I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not most… → Read More
Google always said that its Chromebooks were “for sharing,” but even though they always had a guest mode, they weren’t necessarily set up to be used as public Internet kiosks. Today, Google is changing that with the launch of the new and imaginatively named “Managed Public Sessions” feature. Google says this new feature, which lets you turn your Chrome OS device into… → Read More
The Chromebook Pixel is the best Chromebook ever made. As with all Chromebooks, that may mean nothing to you if you don’t like ChromeOS, but there can be little doubt that the Pixel is a beautiful piece of precision engineering that feels like a premium laptop that wouldn’t be out of place in any line-up of $1,000+ laptops. And that’s before you even look at the 12.86″ touchscreen with the… → Read More
At its Chromebook Pixel event yesterday, Google didn’t just launch its new premium Chromebook. It also announced that it is porting Quickoffice, the mobile productivity app that brings Microsoft Office to iOS and Android to the web through Native Client and Chrome. Google acquired Quickoffice. As Google’s vice president of Chrome Sundar Pichai noted at yesterday’s event, a lot of… → Read More
Google unveiled is fabled Pixel Chromebook today, and the thing does indeed have what looks to be a gorgeous, high-resolution display. It also has a touchscreen, as rumored, and the list gets more confusing from there. 32GB (or 64GB) of onboard storage? ChromeOS? A 3:2 screen ratio? A $1299 starting price tag? Huh? → Read More
Google continues its push to bring its web-centric Chromebooks into schools and it looks as if the fact that Google is in this project for the long haul is starting to pay off. According to Google, 2,000 schools now use Chromebooks for Education. That, by itself, isn’t a massive number, but what’s important to note is that there are now twice as many schools that use Chromebooks compared to just… → Read More
Acer’s ChromeOS-based Chromebooks, the company’s president Jim Wong told Bloomberg today, accounted for “5 percent to 10 percent of Acer’s U.S. shipments since being released there in November.” Google itself has generally been reluctant to share any information about shipments of devices with its browser-centric Linux-based operating system and we haven’t heard any concrete numbers from… → Read More
Google now lets companies rent Chromebooks for $30 per month and Chromeboxes for $25 per month. There are no long-term contracts to sign and rentals are always month-to-month (with the monthly price dropping steadily after the first twelve months). To offer this service, Google has partnered with CIT, a company that provides financing and leasing capital to small and medium businesses. Google… → Read More
It seems like schools are the one market where Google is having some success with its Chromebook initiative. Today, the company announced that there are now 500 school districts in the U.S. and Europe that actively use Chromebooks. The company also announced a few new districts that have recently decided to use Google’s web-centric laptops, including Rockingham Country Schools, N.C., Transylvania… → Read More
Google, together with its partner Samsung, launched a new Chromebook and its first desktop Chromebox today. The most important change to the new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is that it is significantly faster. While earlier versions featured a battery-friendly Intel Atom chip, these first Chromebooks often felt underpowered. This new version features an Intel Core chip, as well as 4GB of RAM, an HD… → Read More
Ever since Google released its cloud storage service Google Drive earlier this week, there has been some speculation as to what its integration with ChromeOS, Google’s cloud-centric operating system, would look like. Today, Google released the first developer version of ChromeOS 20 with support for Google Drive. As expected, Google Drive is now deeply integrated into the ChromeOS file manager… → Read More
It’s hard to say how popular Chrome OS, Google’s browser-centric operating system, really is. There can be little doubt, though, that Google is quite serious about this initiative. Today, Google launched the latest developer version of Chrome OS and this update sports the first major redesign of the operation system’s interface since its launch in late 2010.
In this new version, Chrome OS… → Read More
We’ve been looking for ChromeOS to hit the shelves for a few months now and it looks like Samsung may be one of the first shops to pound out a small, COS netbook with a low-power processor. This mock-up describes a 1.5GHz machine with Atom N550 and 2GB RAM with a 1280 x 800 display. The stats come, from all places, a bug report from the Chromium Google Group. → Read More
Former Googler, FriendFeed founder and Facebook-er turned investor Paul Buchheit just tweeted this zinger:
Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or “merged” with Android)
Considering his former employer just launched the Chrome OS pilot program last week, the comment may sting a little over at Mountain View, although it should be noted Buchheit is hardly the only one predicting that… → Read More
During his presentation at next10 today in Berlin, Jolicloud founder and CEO Tariq Krim talked up the move to HTML5 (via Google’s Chrome browser engine) and indicated that the company’s netbook OS will open up to 3rd party developers within a couple of weeks. Krim has garnered a lot of attention for the free cloud-based operating system, which recently exited beta.
To keep up with the latest… → Read More
Later today at CES, Glide will be debuting its extension for the Google Chrome browser, which it claims turns the software program into a full operating system. The extension, which is also available for Internet Explorer 7+ and Firefox 3.0+, can already be downloaded here.
What Glide does is extend the most popular Internet browsers with a suite of applications that can interact with multiple… → Read More
Had a wonderful time at the Google Holiday Party the other night both because of and in spite of it being “off the record.” The ground rules created an atmosphere where Googlers could be more frank than they usually are (note irony here) and at the same time get to wall off portions of the media’s brains from talking about what they said. These moments feel a lot like the Washington senior… → Read More
The Gillmor Gang convened Wednesday to ponder the last several weeks of events loosely contained in a discussion of the next generation Web operating system. Three major announcements set the table for this Thanksgiving edition: Google’s ChromeOS, Microsoft’s Silverlight 4, and salesforce’s Chatter collaboration platform. The last might be pigeonholed as enterprise Twitter, but Marc Benioff’s… → Read More
In a couple of hours, Google is going to share more details about its upcoming operating system Chrome OS at an event in Mountain View that will most likely be covered from start to finish by TechCrunch writers (and then some) as well as a slew of other media outlets. Jolicloud, that other OS for netbooks that is completely built for people who live and work on the Web from the ground up, has in… → Read More
A blurry snapshot of ChromeOS has surfaced showing a new, Mac-like dock and some battery and wireless notifiers in the bottom corner. This OS looks so stripped down compared to other OSes we’ve used that we’re loathe to call it anything more than a shell. However, we all love us some Google so let’s just stare at it for a while while we eat our Subway sub. → Read More
Although John Gruber is an avowed masticator, I do enjoy his take on issues dealing with and pertaining to technology. To wit: his take on Chrome OS which, in a few paragraphs, boils down the entire argument to “We don’t know enough yet to decide but things look interesting, although it seems like it might be a certain form of vaporware.” → Read More
We’ve been sitting things out today as our brothers at TC pant over ChromeOS, the latest OS based on Linux to impress, however lightly, upon the synapses of our country’s journalistic elite. ChromeOS can’t beat anything. In fact suggesting that ChromeOS will beat Windows or even OS X is like expecting Coby to come up behind Sony and Samsung next year in Blu-Ray player popularity. → Read More
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