Lifehacker’s got a quick Q&A with one of Chrome OS‘s UI designers. It’s quite interesting if you want to get into their mindset about how they make a browser into an entire OS. Plus, they’re thinking about touch! [Lifehacker] More »










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There is much excited talk right now about Eric Schmidt letting slip that Google is indeed working on a tablet. Yeah, I think we all knew that. The only real surprise is that it’s running Android, possibly with Chrome tacked on as the browser. Why not ChromeOS? I suppose Google thinks it would be pretty ridiculous to debut a new OS with a new device, with only web apps available, when the competition will have a million-seller with 180,000 apps already available. Android is the only arrow in their quiver that can strike at iPhone right now. In fact, Google Chrome OS as a separate entity might be a smokescreen.

Stay with me, here. I mean, we can all admit that a Chrome OS tablet would be pretty limited if it really was to be just Google web apps. In the meantime they’ve got all this support for Android… but Android isn’t built for tablets. I guess if anyone can bridge the gap, it’s Google. A sort of crossover OS with access to Android apps but suitable for the larger form factor, multi-touch capabilities, and browser-centric tablet platform would be a natural step to take.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit like aping Apple there — grow your mobile OS to fit the needs of a tablet OS. The best you can come up with is a sort of melange, as Apple seems to have shown. But can they sell that melange? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

In not-too-surprising, yet good-to-know-for-sure news, it seems that Samsung is indeed working on a netbook designed around Chrome OS. Now, what exactly that comprises I can’t tell you — my guess is they’re really just getting a cheap netbook ready to go with whatever Google announces when Chrome OS hits prime time. Or maybe they’ll use one of those neat (useless) transparent ones?

The specs are nothing crazy: 3G, 2GB of RAM to start, 64GB or more of SSD storage, probably a 10.1″ screen, and a nice long battery life. The chipset and processor weren’t disclosed, but the source is suggesting a 1.5GHz Snapdragon. I wonder about that — I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some curveballs in there. Dual Snapdragons, for instance, or a dedicated GPU like the iPad. It’s actually very similar to this speculative post here, except without a price, which makes it much easier to swallow.

Guess we’ll find out… not soon. It’s not clear when they’ll be making the real announcement, and at any rate we’ll probably hear from Google first.

[via Tom's Hardware]

Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet.

These tablets—not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser.

But what about the Courier? If there is such a thing as a “third” option, it’s what Microsoft dreamed up over the last year. Microsoft, already has its fingers in both ends of the pie, but Courier represents a truly different envisioning. Could the tablet that we’ve really been waiting for come from Redmond? Maybe, but at the moment the fate of Courier isn’t clear at all.

Making Phones Bigger

First you have the method of taking a phone interface and making it bigger. That’s the iPad, the Android tablets and, in some modes, Lenovo’s Ideapad U1. Android tablets are basically doing an upscaling of the base Android interface, whereas the iPad also makes customized first-party apps to take advantage of the increased screen space. Both can theoretically run all the apps their little brothers can. Lenovo is also doing something very similar by creating a completely customized ground-up OS that’s sorta widget-based, which is basically a smartphone in everything but name. (When docked, the U1 tablet becomes a screen for a Windows computer, but that’s another story.)

So far, going up from a phone OS seems to be the better bet, compared to simplifying a desktop-style OS. But the phone experience is far from perfect.

When you work off of a smartphone base, you theoretically already have the touch interface locked in, because Android, iPhone, Palm and other smartphones now eschew the skinny stylus for your fat finger. It’s a more natural pointing device for a tablet, since you can hold the device in one hand while pointing at it with the other. If you were to use a stylus, you’d have to grip the tablet with your forearm, like a watermelon or a baby, in order to provide a stable enough surface to press down upon with a pen.

Also, because you’re working with a phone-up methodology, you get to sell a tablet relatively cheap by using high-end phone parts rather than low-end netbook parts. For example, you have Android tablets that are made from ARM processors and Nvidia Tegra graphics, which are basically meant to run high-end phones. Then there’s the Apple A4 processor, which is also ARM-based.

So for these manufacturers, they already have the type of modularized applications with minimal multitasking (in Apple’s case, basically none) that can run decently well on low-powered hardware. Plus, this type of system requirements basically guarantees that you’ll have a better battery life than the alternative.

Jesus already sung much of the praises of this approach when he correctly surmised that the iPad would have this style of operating system. But what about the negatives?

If you’re building a tablet from a phone OS, you would fail to have a completely stand-alone device, in the sense that a laptop is completely standalone. You couldn’t have file access to dump photos, video and other media onto, you’d have to sync it to something else once in a while to get everything you need. And you have to go through a marketplace instead of installing stuff like a computer.

There is also no real way for apps to interact with each other. There’s copy and paste on smartphones, and certain apps can read data files from certain other apps (like the contact list), but there’s no way to interact like dragging and dropping files across applications. In the iPhone, you can’t even multitask to work on two things simultaneously. You can on Android, but there’s minimal interaction between applications. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it’s just not so entrenched in the base OS or the base philosophy that application developers don’t do it very often. If the OS maker doesn’t do it, developers won’t either.

Also, because phones are a very isolated experience, App Stores make it much easier to find apps that are both customized for your device and safe to install. This is great for phones, since stability is important, but when you’re getting into higher-performance devices, you want the ability to choose what apps you want, not just pick from the ones that Apple or Google deem OK for you to consume. And since this kind of tablet is adapted from the phone ecosystem, that’s the only choice you have.

To have a very good experience on any sort of serious computing device (not a phone), you need interactivity. An example on the Mac is the way your Mail application knows if someone is online in iChat, and shows a little light by his name, telling you that you can just IM him instead of emailing. Interactivity like this is part of the base design experience of Courier, judging on the videos we posted. You can move parts of each application easily into any other application, and each piece knows what’s being dumped onto it. The current state of phones can’t, and don’t this co-mingling philosophy engrained into it.

Peripherals is something else a phone-based OS can’t handle well. You’re limited to a specific number of device accessories that needs to be vetted in order to ensure compatibility. Even the iPad, which has a few more accessories than the iPhone (like a keyboard), doesn’t have nearly the amount of compatibility as a desktop. A tablet needs to learn this lesson from desktops in order to be truly useful. Plug in a keyboard? Sure. A firewire camera to have the device act as a target storage device? Absolutely. Another tablet, so you can have twice the amount of display area? Why the hell not. Print? Yes.

All this stuff is doable on phone devices, if developers wanted to. Hell, anything is possible if you want it to be. None of this stuff is against the laws of physics, it’s just a matter of wanting to put it in. There’s no reason why these phone-based OSes can’t accept peripherals, multitask, and do everything better than a phone. It’s just against the design philosophy.

But not all of this is software. There are certain hardware expectations that can’t be met with the current batch of phone OSes. If you’re looking at devices on a curve, you have your phone, then your tablet, then your laptop and your desktop. As the size of a increases, your expectation for power does too, and battery life decreases in accordance. So theoretically, in a tablet device, you’d want to have one significant step up in performance over phones, which we’re not seeing in these devices. I’m not talking just running the same applications faster, with upscaled graphics, I’m talking entirely new things you can only do with increased processing power. Stuff like true multitasking, games that are actually noticeably better than cellphone games, light media editing (not as good as a laptop, of course) and media playback of all kinds, handling all sorts of codecs.

That’s right, people expect more functionality and power with that bigger screen. Android’s tablets run Android apps pretty fast, but not so fast that they’re on an entirely new level. Widget-ized computing may prove to be practical, something people need as a second device. But for anybody in need of real heavy-duty computing, like Photoshop photo editing or Final Cut video processing, the design of a tablet simply won’t do.

Shrinking PCs Down

Then, you have the people who have taken a windows-style desktop-metaphor interface and simplified it for a tablet. There’s the HP slate, which runs Windows 7 but, knowing HP, will come with a friendly TouchSmart skin to hide Windows from sight while you’re doing basic media and (hopefully) social stuff. There are various other Windows 7 tablets, including the Archos 9, basically just Windows 7 machines stripped of their keyboard. (Some have styluses.)

What makes no sense about the new crop of Windows-powered tablets is that they are based on a design concept that is already proven not to work. You’ll recall back to the first time Microsoft tried these tablets, with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, around the turn of the century, and you’ll remember that although the premise was neat, the execution had no unique functionality, no specific base of great apps, from Microsoft or anybody else. It was just a regular laptop with a stylus interface thrown in. What has changed? Now you can use your finger, instead:

There are benefits: Excellent peripheral support, the ability to install custom applications, true multitasking and cross-app interactivity, enhanced media performance, etc. In short, everything you expect from a low-powered Windows laptop, you can more or less expect here. But that extra boost of juice, that ongoing background chatter, demand more on the system. The downside is that battery is never remotely as good, and you have to deal with old-world Windows issues, like slower boot times, sleep issues, and, yes, viruses.

HP has worked hard to sell the concept of the touch PC with their TouchSmart platform. We have seen the desktop all-in-one TouchSmarts running multitouch Windows 7 but there wasn’t a lot of software for them. Now, HP appears to be pinning its hopes to the slate, presumably giving a nice “tablet” interface on top of Windows 7 when you need it, but with the ability to pop back into desktop mode when you don’t. That’s fine, better even, but it’s not a coherent computing experience.

Since it’s ultimately a desktop OS, it’s not designed for the type of input schemes you have on tablets. Besides, what happens when something running in the background crashes or demands attention? Nothing will shake you from your tablet reverie like an unexpected alert from the good people of Norton that your PC is in grave danger of being violated. Unless the tablet-friendly environment is more than skin deep, like the ones phone developers now use to hide Windows Mobile, the whole thing is a wash. By delaying on the Courier and promoting Windows 7 touch tablets, Microsoft’s making the same kind of mistake that made WinCE devices (Windows Mobile) slow and clunky. They’re offering up their standard base operating system and just telling people to add a skin on top, which is not the way to a tablet revolution.

Desktop Lite: The Browser-Only Approach

Frankly, we’re not sure where to put JooJoo and the mysterious Chrome OS. Their philosophy? Why design a whole new OS when you can take the screen most people stare at most often—the web browser—and effectively limit your OS to that. Sure, web apps are only going to get better, richer. But this approach seems to take the limitations of both the phone and the desktop-metaphor OS, with almost none of the benefits of either.

Everything we’ve seen from the Chrome OS, both early on and more recently, suggests that it is typical white-on-black boring Google desktop style. We hope there’s a trick or two up its sleeve, because if it’s just a Chrome browser in a box, it might suffer.

We know more about the JooJoo. What’s nice about it is that, presumably like the Chrome, its browser is a real WebKit PC browser, not a skimpy mobile one, so it supports Flash and Silverlight, and therefore Hulu, YouTube in HD, and other great video experiences. It does have a 1MP webcam, as well, but it’s only for “video conferencing,” if and when a browser-based video Skype comes along.

What We Need Is a Third Approach

The tablet operating system problem is one that no one has actually solved in the thirty-something years of personal computing, even though tablets have been in the public’s imagination for at least that long.

The biggest players, Apple, Google and Microsoft have huge investments in both desktop and mobile software, and seem to attack this tablet problem from attacking with both Android and Chrome OS. They’re all using their previous knowledge to get a head start. This is bad. Neither of these two solutions is optimal.

Surprisingly enough, it’s Microsoft—preoccupied as it is with mobile and desktop—that’s perhaps closest to this golden mean of tablets.

If you watch the Courier video above, you’ll notice that it’s an entirely new class of interface. It doesn’t have anything reminiscent of applications, which are the way phones do it, and it doesn’t have the traditional windowing (lower-case) for programs, which is what desktops use. It’s kinda just one big interface where everything talks to everything else, where you can do stuff in a natural way that makes sense.

Or take a look at this video. Again, it’s neither phone nor desktop—it’s designed with finger pointing in mind, optimized for this middle-ground in screen size. This is just a concept render, but it serves the point: We’re looking for something completely new with an interface that “just works” for the device, giving you features from the desktop-side such as multitasking, serious computing and the ability to run any app without having to go through a locked-down application store funnel. But we also don’t want to sacrifice the gestures, fingerability or light-weightness that you gain from smartphones.

It might never happen. It takes years and massive amounts of manpower to create a new operating system. Microsoft’s taking forever just getting Windows Phone into the 21st century. While we have faith (somehow) that Microsoft will revamp its mobile franchise in its 7th iteration, it’s unlikely that they would also then push out an entirely new operating system anytime in the next few years. More problematic is the recent insistence by Steve Ballmer at CES that Windows 7 tablets are the solution, when they very clearly are not.

If not Microsoft, then who? Apple and Google have already shown what they plan to do in the tablet space—and their operating systems may grow and develop in ways only hinted at now. The iPhone platform is not bad, and if they can break through the glass ceiling described above, it could be the answer. Google Chrome OS could also manifest itself in unexpected ways, even if we currently don’t have too much optimism. Until that day arrives—or until the unlikely event that an upstart designs a seriously revolutionary OS and accompanying hardware platform to deliver it on—we’ll have to make do with our big phones and keyboardless laptops.

As more people move away from lucrative Windows desktops (OK, more is a relative term, but it’s definitely a countable number) folks like McAfee have to find new threats for us to fear in order to ensure that we purchase their products.

The latest scare? McAffee is warning us that HTML5 in Chrome OS will be able to hack us even when we’re not online. They have no proofs of concept, no actual data… it’s just conjecture.

That BusinessWeek picked this up with a delightfully alarmist headline is also a testament to McAffee’s success. Oh well. Folks like McAffee have to eat as well, so stay scared, web users!

A handful of sites are linking to a post on NetbookNews.de, which links to a post on a UK-based site called IBTimes titled Google Chrome OS-based netbook tech specs are out. It seems fishy and the site doesn’t get a lot of traffic in the first place but if the post ends up being credible, I apologize.

The post starts out with “the tech specs of the rumoured Google Chrome OS-based netbook are already out” followed by “tech bloggers have already begun speculating about the netbook’s specs” followed by “The Google netbook, it is reported, will run on Chrome OS…” etc. But where is this being “reported”? And is this information based on speculation by tech bloggers or actual sources? There’s a world of difference there.

Then the next paragraph begins with “It is also being rumoured that the netbook will sport…” So we have that the tech specs are “out” but all the information seems to be based on rumors. Whatever the case, here’s what we’re apparently working with:

• NVIDIA Tegra platform with ARM CPU
• 10.1-inch TFT HD-ready multi-touch display
• 64GB solid state drive
• 2GB of RAM
• Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB ports, webcam, card reader
• Subsidized at less than $300, sold directly to consumers by Google

The post then ends by saying “Now if all of these are true, it’s like getting a Ferrari for the price of a Mini Cooper.” That’s pretty much an admission that none of these specs can be officially confirmed. And let’s look at the actual plausibility of the specs.

- Subsidized at $300 or less: Maybe. Google says Chrome OS netbooks “will be in the price range that people are used to for netbooks today.” The Nokia Booklet 3G is subsidized at $300, but that’s about the top of the scale as far as pricing goes.

- Sold directly to consumers by Google: Maybe. When initially asked about Chrome OS netbook pricing, Google said “You will hear that from our partners.” Recent rumors, however, seem to indicate that Google may be seeking a hardware developer to build a Google-branded netbook. It seems odd, though, that Google would create its own netbook only to then partner with a wireless company to subsidize the price of it and that such a product would be sold directly by Google and not also in the wireless carrier’s retail locations.

- NVIDIA Tegra platform with ARM CPU: Plausible, likely.

- 10.1-inch TFT HD-ready multi-touch display: Not likely to get multi-touch for $300. If it’s indeed being subsidized, multi-touch is a possibility.

- 64GB solid state drive: This is the biggest red flag, as far as I’m concerned. Everything is supposed to be “in the cloud” with this platform. Maybe a 4GB or 8GB solid state drive. There’s no use for a 64GB drive and it’d add to the overall cost of the netbook.

- 2GB of RAM: Likely.

- Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, etc.: Plausible, likely.

Now it’s entirely possible that these could be the specs for a particular vendor that’s intent on selling a Chrome OS-based netbook, but the idea of a flagship Chrome OS netbook with a 64GB drive and subsidized price tag sold directly by Google to consumers seems unlikely.