The search giant's manoeuvres this week with Chrome OS -- and especially the advent of Chromebooks -- indicate Google is intent on redefining the PC desktop OS as we know it.
This week at Google's I/O developer conference in San Francisco the company unveiled what it is calling a "new kind of computer": the Chromebook. The Chromebook, the first models of which will become available online in the US and Europe on June 15 (with other countries to follow in the coming months), resembles a conventional notebook, but Google is at pains to stress that it's not the kind of notebook PC you're familiar with.
By casting aside a traditional desktop OS such as Windows or Mac OS (together with "the headaches of operating systems designed 20 to 30 years ago"), the Chromebook, powered by Google's web-centric Chrome OS, is designed to offer a speedy, secure and simple-to-run PC user experience without the bloat of a conventional PC software installation.
As Linus Upson and Sundar Pichai (Vice President of Engineering & Senior Vice President, Chrome respectively) put it on the official
Google blog: "With a Chromebook you won’t wait minutes for your computer to boot and browser to start. You’ll be reading your email in seconds. Thanks to automatic updates the software on your Chromebook will get faster over time. Your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you won't need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files."
Chrome OS was announced by Google years ago but, compared with the rampant development on (and publicity surrounding) the company's mobile platform, Android, progress has seemed somewhat slow. Google made a minor stir when it distributed an early test prototype of the Chromebook concept late last year, the Cr-48, but reviewers widely derided that release's hobbled state (largely due to netbook-level specs and the lack of an integrated file manager).
Undeterred, Google advocates that: "With HTML5 and other open standards, web applications will soon be able to do anything traditional applications can do, and more." And with the latest enhancements made to Chrome OS as announced this week (notably improved file management and offline support - both fairly indispensable for any kind of serious computing platform), it appears Google's new-wave desktop OS might finally be ready for prime time.
The initial Chromebook models announced this week will be manufactured by Samsung and Acer. Samsung's Series 5 will retail for US$429 and sports an Intel Atom N570 CPU and 12.1-inch 1,280 x 800 display with 8.5-hour battery life. Acer's machine features the same processor with an 11.6-inch 1,366 x 768 screen and 6-hour battery life, and will retail for US$349. Both notebooks feature 16GB SSD storage.
Specifications-wise there's not too much to get excited about in terms of the hardware (with both Chromebooks residing somewhere between netbook and low-end ultraportable territory), but what's chiefly of interest is to see how well they'll run Chrome OS - and how viable the whole cloud OS experience is as a whole (now that the wrinkles are said to have been ironed out).
According to Google, we can expect 8-second boot times on the Chromebooks, self-updating apps (and a self-updating OS) plus built-in security, with the "first consumer operating system designed from the ground up to defend against the ongoing threat of malware and viruses."
And security will indeed be of paramount importance if Google is to succeed in wooing enterprise users towards the Chromebook/Chrome OS platform. In addition to outright Chromebook purchases aimed at the consumer market, the company has also announced a Business and Education service, which includes a cloud management console (possibly to be administered by a "Chromebox" desktop PC for admins), enterprise-level support and monthly Chromebook subscriptions starting at start at US$28 per user for businesses and US$20 per user for schools.
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