Mountain View, California — Addressing a crowd of reporters and guests, search engine titan Google provided an update on its forthcoming browser-based operating system, Chrome OS, a fresh challenge to Microsoft’s dominant Windows OS and emerging Linux, and invited attendees and select early adopters to try Chrome OS running on an unbranded netbook through a pilot program.
The Chrome initiative, led by Indian-American Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice-president for product management, was launched as a trial program that users can register for online and will eventually be offered pre-installed on a range of computers made by major manufacturers such as Acer and Samsung.
Pichai, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and the chief evangelist for Chrome OS within Google, said, “We are delivering nothing but the Web.”
Penning on the Google Blog, Linus Upson and Sundar Pichai together wrote that the “The test notebooks exist only to test the software they are black, have no branding, no logos, no stickers, nothing. They do have 12.1 inch screens, full-sized keyboards and touch pads, integrated 3G from Verizon, eight hours of battery life and eight days of standby time. Chrome notebooks are designed to reach the web instantly”.
At an event, Google also gave a gleaming glance at its new tablet, which is being developed by Motorola and will run the new Honeycomb version of its successful Android software. Moreover, the device, which looked to be around ten inches in size, will see Google take on Apple’s iPad in tablets while it takes on Microsoft with its operating system.
Google Mobile Platform vice president Andy Rubin refused to give away any details of the device apart from displaying its homepage and saying it will run a dual-core computer chip.
Although the initial plans are for a trial program that will only be available on a small scale, in due course Google’s new operating system could be offered as a standard option when consumers buy laptops or PCs. In the new OS system, applications and data will not be physically stored on the computer but in a “cloud”, basically in an online environment.
“Many people already spend all their time in a web browser, and by building an operating system that is essentially a browser, we can make computers faster, much simpler and fundamentally more secure,” Pichai and Upson, wrote in an official post.
“We finally have a viable third choice for an operating system,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google.
The search engine giant previously promised to have its Chrome operating system ready by the end of this year. Google’s Chrome browser, launched in September 2008 as an alternative to Internet Explorer, has already challenged Microsoft’s dominance in the market. Pichai, who joined Google in 2004, was also the person responsible for the browser.
Google also opened a Chrome store offering apps in San Francisco on Tuesday.
View the Chrome OS Slide Show below:
Slide show by eBrandz, (Image credits: InformationWeek)