We may see an Acer device with Google’s Chrome OS at next month’s Computex, according to a report from Venture Beat.
There are very few details about what the device will be, as the browser-based OS is meant for netbooks, smartbooks and it could also fit nicely on a tablet. The platform looks to radically change the way we compute by putting nearly everything in the browser. Of course, the biggest questions with this approach is how do you play media, edit photos or print. These devices will have some form of internal storage that you can load up tunes or videos on and I’m sure there will be some rudimentary player included. The search giant recently purchased the photo-editing site Picnik to handle photos and it also launched a cloud-based printing initiative.
I love the vision of your computer just being a terminal to the cloud but I get the feeling Chrome OS will pull a LeBron and fail to show up in a big way. The biggest detraction may actually be from Google itself in the form of Android because that little green robot is starting to show up all over the place, including on netbooks and tablets. Google and Verizon are already prepping an Android-based tablet and I’m betting that will get a bigger marketing push than nearly any Chrome OS device.
What’s more, Android makes a lot more sense for the tablet or netbook space because of the growing Android Market ecosystem. I can do most of my work and leisure within a browser but I think it’s a waste for Google to push another platform that won’t be able to leverage the innovation we’ve already seen with the little green robot.
I’d expect Chrome OS to eventually be merged with Android or just go away entirely. Sure, Google made a big fuss about this OS and has probably sunk in a ton of cash developing it but the search giant is quick to admit its mistakes. It also made a big to-do about selling phones online through its store and it found that to be a mistake.
[Via VentureBeat]