Chrome OS

The Chrome Laptop. Conformity?

A few days ago, Google unveiled its newest creations: the Chrome OS and the Google Laptop. A Google operating system for netbooks has been long awaited. Windows 7 and it’s cheaper version, Windows 7 Starter, have proven to take up too much processing and RAM to be an effective operating system for netbooks. Will the chrome operating system be the answer?

From going through the announcement website, I have compiled what the Chrome laptop essentially is. Before I go into that though, we need to have a little ordinal history lesson. I don’t want to bore you with dates, but if you want specifics, here’s the wikipedia article on the history of computers. Everyone has heard the stories about how computers used to take up entire rooms and all that. It used to be all about having a central controlled computer system. Instead of having your own computers like today, you might work on a terminal that could be in the same room as the supercomputer, or even miles away at your home via a cable connection. So the actual machine you were working on contained nothing important, it just communicated with the central computer. Today this is called “cloud” computing. Technology improved as it always does, giving computers the ability to be smaller, more powerful, and a lot less expensive. My Dad spent thousands of dollars on his first desktop computer that had like a whopping 512 MB hard drive or something like that, maybe even less.  My iPhone could run circles around that computer processing wise, and don’t even get me started about features.

Back to my Dad’s ancient computer, the PC (personal computer) was born. Remember this was pre internet, so you needed hardware to transfer files to other systems such as floppy disks. The main function of computers at this point was applications such as Word and Excel. So in this way there was no more cloud computing(except for businesses), people just did work on their own machines. Strengths? Well you could be a on a desert island, and as long as you had a generator, it would be the same as working in the middle of New York city with one of those computers. Weaknesses? Some jerk with a baseball bat could break your computer, or your house burns down, and bye bye to anything you don’t have saved on floppy disks. So in this way, we went from working from one central control center to individual independent work stations.

Along comes the internet with its appeal to connect to other computers and exchange information, how exciting! Websites were born, and soon after, downloads and uploads. This was the start of the cloud computing comeback, at least on a consumer level. Email servers such as yahoo come about, giving you the ability to log onto any computer (key word ANY) with an internet connection to your email. Yahoo calendar and other services such as Maps, which is customized for each person (I refuse to talk about AOL). Google comes out of nowhere and walked in like they owned the place, and soon did. (This is around today) At this point, pretty much everything that consumers use is online. We check facebook to make sure our friends still know we exist, we use pandora radio because we’re too cheap to actually buy music, flckr to pretend others want to look at our pictures, and google calendar to make sure we remember when classes are. Yet Word processing and Excel are still on our actual computer…and then I found google documents. So are offline applications  even necessary needed these days? And THAT is what google is going for with the Chrome netbook.

Now that this idea has sunk in, that we  don’t NEED offline computing, think about whether this could work for you. Google’s addition of the online app store, very similar in format to the itunes store , makes this a possible new choice in computing. Now the first question is, what are the positives of having a netbook that is completely dependent on being online? The operating system comes from online on Google’s server. There really isn’t any real information on the actual computer, so not only is there no way of corrupting the actual computer, but it makes the actual computer sort of disposable. Google claims that each internet window acts independent of each other, so that if a website is found to be corrupted or full of malware (applications that will steal your personal information), it can isolate that window from the others leaving your information unharmed.

Convenience

What is the most annoying aspect of computers today? Is it the annoying sound that comes on when you turn it on? Battery life notification saying your computer is about to shut down? No, those are all anticipated and can be easily avoided. For me anyway, nothing is worse than getting an update message: Microsoft’s auto update starts running and acts like it owns the computer, a page won’t open saying you need to download the newest version of Java, iTunes has an update, Photoshop needs to update for three hours because it wants to, etc. etc. etc. Well Google has an answer to these problems. Because all of the applications are online, the updates are dealt with where the applications are installed, which is not your computer. Think about the Facebook and Microsoft Word for a second. When Facebook completely redesigned the profile page, you were given the option to click”update” button on other peoples’ updated pages, and two seconds later you are using the new format. I didn’t even ask Word to see if I could install some annoying updates, one minute after opening Word to write a paper, a screen saying a necessary update needs to be installed. The google netbook is Facebook in this situation, while everything else is Word.

The actual hardware is irrelevant. It’s the same as using cash verse using a credit card, you can throw away the actual computer and just log onto another one, just like getting a new ATM card from the bank. Nothing is stored on the computer so nothing is lost, and since it will be a lot cheaper than a full sized laptop, having one break or something and needing another isn’ that big of a deal.

So what’s the catch

(I don’t mean this literally) This is not a computer, this is a large phone that has taken texting to a whole level. There is a no hard drive so there is no offline computing. There isn’t anything this thing does that other computers can’t do. It really is comparing something like the Amazon Kindle to the iPad, it does one thing well, but just for a lot cheaper than the iPad. From what I understand, there won’t even be a notepad application that you can use offline. Just like the iPhone, you are limited to the applications available from the online store. It is a netbook, the size of these machines makes typing a pain, and will take some getting use to if using all day.  This could be as fast online as full featured laptop such as the Macbook Pro, but I doubt it.

Recommendation

As long as this is priced competitively with other netbooks, this could be a  winner. I really hate working on a netbook. While they are extremely useful because of how small they are, the speed compared to my Macbook Pro kills me every time. Even trying to stream standard definition video through hulu is a not an easy experience on a netbook. If the google netbook can have all the positives of the netbook with size/weight and battery life, while giving this promising performance, this could become the iPhone of computers. If you see yourself more online than not and aren’t a huge multimedia person demanding large applications, this could be a great tool for you. This is especially useful if your life is centered around a location with wifi.

Who is this not for? Me, and well anyone doesn’t see him or herself using only internet applications. Even my phone, (iPhone) can use most of its applications (mostly games) offline. If I’m working on something in Seattle, I want to be able to hop on a bus and not be interrupted with my work, just because I have lost an internet connection while going below ground in a tunnel.

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