Google Chrome OS – Chromium OS (beta) quick review

Soon, we will see myriad of manufactures coming up with Chromium netbooks: the netbooks that run Google Chrome OS. We managed to get hold of a beta copy from you-know-where and tried it using Virtual machine.

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Here is the login screen of the Chrome OS. Google has kept it simple. You need to have a Gmail account in order to login. After all, this is a Google OS and to use Google Services like Gtalk, Google Docs and Gmail, you need to have a Google account.

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Google Chrome OS is perfect for laptop and netbook gadgets. It is simple and straight-forward. No “submit” button or cancel button. Just press enter to log-in. Note that we were on a WiFi network when testing Chrome OS.

It opens your gmail immediately after you log-in.

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Everything is organized into tabs. At first glance, it would look like a plain-jane web-browser to anybody. But, it is actually not. It is a full-brown OS whose image file is well over 700MB.

Chrome OS settings

Here, you can manage the touchpad’s sensitivity and speed.

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Oddly, in the below screenshot, it says that Google cannot determine the default browser. 🙂

The start up was somewhere between 10 seconds. It did not feel speedy, but then we were testing it under Virtual machine, which does not run operating systems at mind-blowing speeds.

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Chrome OS will run on both ARM and X86 infrastructures which means that it could make its way to MIDs as-well-as smartphones. This increases the probability of acceptance of Chrome OS by the OEMs and manufactures. The Chromium OS is cool and fresh. With a push from a huge company like Google, it won’t be a tough task for Google to make this project a success