Image via WikipediaThis story today about Android making Chrome unnecessary prompts this post.Android is a great mobile operating system. I've owned a Droid from Motorola since they first came out in November of 2009. The number and variety of apps on the Android platform make it a powerful and useful operating system. It has a browser app, as well as apps for navigation, maps, music, social networking, etc. And now with tablets based on Android 3.0 due to make an appearance in the first half of 2011, what do we need with a keyboard/browser based operating system like Chrome OS?
I think, and this is just my opinion, that if you are a user of Google Apps and you have your business/data in the cloud, you need a more traditional interface to deal with it. If I'm editing a document or a proposal or a presentation, I want to have a physical keyboard, not a touch-based screen keyboard that takes up valuable screen real estate. Especially when working on presentations or any graphically intense application. Heck, I know people who own and iPhone and an iPad, but when they sit down to do real work, they grab their keyboard.
One of the new items shown at CES was a transformer-like machine that basically was a tablet that had a detachable keyboard. This type of product is probably closer to what might see adaptation as a more "work-ready" solution. And of course, if you pay attention to these types of things, you've seen that Android has been installed on the CR-48. I'm not sure how that works since I really think of Android as a screen input model. Android has a lot of nice single-focus applications. These types of apps are usually small and can live on a small memory device with ease. But if you need the power of an application that can produce complicated spreadsheets with embedded javascript or something akin to that, you need a cloud-based architecture, with perhaps hundreds of GB of data storage and 99.9% uptime with replication and security.
I've already started to find that I don't use as much of my desktop's power as I used to. Most of my documents are in the cloud, as are my photos. I don't have to worry about backups or security. Google takes care of that for me. The hardware platform I use for this type of work means a keyboard and a mouse, and that's my preference.
That's where I think Chrome OS fits. What do you think?
Just saw another blog where the author thought the Chrome OS was only being aimed at netbook computers by Google. I disagree. Chrome OS can be installed on much larger desktop clients (think thin-clients). That's where it will be useful and save a business a lot of money!
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