Since the introduction of Chrome OS there’s been quite a bit of confusion over what Google hopes to achieve with both Chrome OS and it’s ever increasingly popular tablet slice of its Android OS. It’s clear that Google believe that the future of computing lies solely with the web and the services delivered – Android was solely, and still is to some extent, about getting Google’s services into the hands of more and more people. With that said it’s strange to see why someone would own a Chrome OS machine and an Android tablet or, why they should choose one of the other. They both seem to offer the same level of service, to a point.
TechRadar has heard from Google’s own Vice President of Engineering, Linus Upson that there won’t be a Chrome OS tablet but, that there will be convergence of the two platforms and that the gap will become ever smaller. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the line between the two will become blurred, however Upson tells TechRadar:
“We are not working on a Chrome OS tablet.”
“We have our hands full in delivering a wonderful experience on desktop and laptop and the Android team have their hands full bringing a great experience on phone and tablet. But the two teams are working together even more closely.”
This sort of closeness has already been seen in the latest release of Chrome OS, titled ‘Luna’, which revamps the user experience in a number of ways including a notification and system toggle tray similar to that of Ice Cream Sandwich’s. Rightly so, Upson points out the following:-
“The use cases in technology stacks on phone and tablet are very different to desktop and laptop, as are the user expectations, and the types of things you do are also very different,”
It’s true that when someone picks up a laptop they expect a different experience than that of a tablet, no matter how good ASUS become at straddling the gap. This is probably something that drove the change to a more desktop-oriented UI for the ‘Luna’ release of Chrome OS, the way we think of laptops has changed over the last few years as well, no longer is it commonplace to buy a desktop computer for simple web browsing or light productivity, you’re more likely to buy a laptop for that and the desktop for serious work or gaming. Google hope to deliver the web along with all the light productivity associated with it to notebooks on Chrome OS.
It seems that this convergence will be a product of not only increasingly powerful ARM chips – of which you can brush up on here – but also of what Chrome OS strives to deliver, a coherent and powerful web browsing experience:-
“With Chrome on Android and Chrome OS and Chrome on Windows or on Mac you get the same web browsing experience everywhere.”
With Android becoming more and more powerful thanks to ARM chips rocketing in power and Chrome OS becoming more Desktop-oriented it sure looks like Google have every corner of the web covered. It’s going to be interesting to see if this convergence is something we see more of at Google I/O. Where I firmly believe the Chrome team to unveil the version 1.0 release of Chrome for Mobile incorporating massive speed boosts and stability improvements.