Chrome OS Netbooks coming later this year

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google told CNN that the first Chrome OS devices will be coming later this year. These devices will be powered by either ARM or Intel processors. He also mentioned that the devices will have keyboard and there would be no local storage. Everything will be stored on cloud.

“People who believe in cloud computing, believe in the benefits of Web computing and who are Chrome users will be the target market,” he said. “It’s probably a large market.”

Chrome OS to feature Orientation-detection

Google is going to include orientation-detection feature in the upcoming release of Chrome OS allowing the developer to detect the orientation using the device’s accelerometer and accordingly rotate the screen (interface) for the user. 

It is obvious that Google will also need to make some modification in the Chrome browser to incorporate this new feature since it is not implemented in the current versions. Infact, none of the web-browsers, including the powerful Firefox and Safari posses this capability.

No Google-branded Chrome OS netbook in the works

Google makes awesome web-apps and is most well known for its amazing search engine, Google. However, when asked if the company is working on any netbook running Chromium OS, the answer was “we would not need to” because Google believes that the PC industry is different from the phone industry.

So, the Google is going to try and focus on what it does the best – Software. But, never say ‘never’ as Google may change their mind in future and surprise everybody with Google Tablet or Google Chromium Netbook

Chrome Flow now available

Hexxeh has released a new, updated build of the Chromium OS. This new build brings NVidia ION acceleration and battery life improvements. The menu is also customizable now. However, this build only works when installed on a physical drive and does NOT works in VMware.

Samsung prepping Chromium netbook

Samsung’s Australian head has confirmed that Samsung is making a netbook based on Chrome OS that will be similar to Samsung N210 netbook. This rumored netbook is expected to sport the new Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 1.5GHz processor. Other confirmed specifications include 10.1-inch display, 2GB RAM, 64GB SSD for storage, built-in 3G and 12-hour of runtime.

Add Chrome OS Menu to Google Chrome Browser

Want to add Chrome OS menu to the Chromium’s Browser? Follow these steps:

• Right click on the Google Chrome Browser icon on your desktop.
• Select “Properties”
• Look for “Target”
• In the  ”Target” box, after chrome.exe” put a space, and add the following line of code
• -user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5″ -pinned-tab-count=1
• Now, Click “Apply” and then “OK”
• Now go to “Options” menu in Google Chrome settings.
• Under “Home Page”, select ” Open This Page”
• Enter http://welcome-cros.appspot.com/menu
• Hit “close”
• Restart your Chrome browser
• That’s it!

Note that the Chrome OS menu page is, otherwise, not directly accessible

More on Chrome OS security – Hybrid apps in danger

According to McAfee folks, the apps that fall in the category of somewhere between online and offline apps are going to be primarily targeted by the hackers.

So, who is the culprit? Believe it or not, it is the HTML5 which is still being tested. Google Wave is a good example of HTML5 implementation. Here is a quote from McAfee’s officials,

"Google Chrome OS is intended for use with netbooks, and HTML5 enables not only a rich internet experience, but also offline applications. Another motivation for attackers is HTML 5’s anticipated cross-platform support, which will allow attackers to eventually reach users of many mainstream browsers"

At first blush, it all may seem a bit terrifying, but fear not. It is Google, not just another company which will let this project fail in any way. Google will find ways to block these uncalled-for attempts.

Read Chrome OS review

Chrome netbook specs – comes with 64GB SSD?

Last week, we mentioned that Google is working on a netbook based on Chrome OS. We have some more interesting news regarding it – it will come with 64GB SSD and will have 2GB RAM. Specifications are looking decent now:

10.1-inch display, 64GB SSD, 2GB RAM, Nvidia Tegra CPU, Bluetooth, WiFi, LAN, Webcam and multi-card reader

Chrome OS will run apps in Native Code

Google has announced that the Chrome OS aka Chromium will run various Google applications like Gmail, Spreadsheets and Docs in their native code. This is being done in order to make the overall performance faster and make the system more responsive.

Google has promised not to use any third party technologies like Flash, Java or Silverlight as they do not interact directly with the processor.

Unfortunately, the Native Client that handles the native code in Chrome’s browser runs only on the machines that are x86-based. But, Google has promised that they will get it ported to ARM platform too.

Google Go – Google’s programming language will also be made compatible with the Native Client.

Read Google Chrome OS review

Google Chrome Netbook coming

Google is working with one hardware manufacture to build a Google branded netbook that will run the Chromium OS.

We applaud this decision by Google. Reason: OEMs are not able to get things quite right and we may not be able to get the experience the OS provider expected us to get.

We concur with techcrunch which is saying that the Chrome-powered by Google will most likely be powered by ARM processor. The reason is that it is much more power-frugal than the Atom processor and at the same time is able to run HD videos with no problem.

However, to get our hands  on this chromium netbook, we will have to wait until X-Mas next year.

Read Chrome OS Review