If you own a Chrome OS device, the future could hold a very interesting feature for you. It appears that within the Chrome OS dev channel a possible new upcoming feature was spotted that would allow people who use a Chrome OS device like a Chromebook, to be unlocked when they come within a certain distance while they have their smartphone on them. Essentially, your smartphone would be able to unlock your Chromebook just by you entering into its vicinity. As our own Alex Maxham points out, it sounds pretty similar to the Trusted Devices feature found on the Moto X, which basically allows you to keep the phone in a constant unlock state when you’re within range of a trusted Bluetooth device. It’s not quite the same but it follows the same general use, which is to unlock something based on proximity.
The yet unreleased feature for Chrome OS is being referred to currently as Easy Unlock and at this point in time is still in beta testing. You can actually reach the dev channel and enable the feature from within Chrome flags, but once you get to that point the feature remains unusable which points to it still being a little ways off. Although things are still not accessible by users, the idea of being able to bypass your password and instead just have you Chromebook unlock when you come within range of it is a pretty sweet feature that we would love to see go mainstream.
There isn’t any mention or hints at when this could potentially go live for users, or even when public beta testing might begin, if ever. At this point it seems testing might be limited to Googlers. Would you use this feature if it were made available? Perhaps we’ll begin to see it open up with the launch of some of the new Chromebooks in the near future. It’s also possible that since you can enable the feature from within the Chrome Devs channel means that it will be on its way sometime sooner than we think. If you want to tinker with the feature and enable it anyway, you can do so by navigating to chrome://flags/#enable-easy-unlock, and rebooting your system.