Yesterday Google officially announced Chrome OS. For those of you who haven’t heard of it Chrome OS is Google’s non-Android operating system that consists of a web browser and… nothing else really. Chrome OS is literally an instance of the Chrome web browser running on top of a Linux kernel. No applications exist outside of the web browser which basically means with the exception of HTML5 offline support the OS is worthless without an Internet connection.
You can probably tell I don’t find the OS all that useful especially when Google already has an operating system that could be adapted to small notebooks called Android. Either way there are a couple of interesting things regarding the web browser OS. First Google will actually offer some form of live support. My biggest headache with Android ended up being the complete lack of any support from Google. Google’s system lost all records of the Android applications I purchased and the only option is to post on their support forum which they apparently don’t monitor at all (I still haven’t received a single reply to my post). Of course Google also offered support for the Nexus One and in less than a year terminated it and sent you to HTC (who manufactured the Nexus One) for your support needs. Either way I don’t have much faith in Google supporting Chrome OS for very long.
The more interesting news item I found was the fact that Verizon will give all Chrome OS users 100MB a month of 3G data for free. I think a majority of people in the comments section are bitching that 100MB is nothing this day and age but for free what do you fucking expect? It’s enough to check your e-mail once in a while when you don’t have Wi-Fi available to you. Of course you can get unlimited data from Verizon for the rather steep price of $9.99… a day. Yikes! That’s actually worse than AT&T’s data plan which is already pretty fucking poor ($20.00 for 2GB and then $10.00 for each additional GB over that). On the upside that $9.99 a day doesn’t require a contract.
Either way I’m still not impressed with the idea of Chrome OS. Every small notebook on the planet already comes with a web browser plus a whole lot more. Being even more impressive these other notebooks are still useful if you have no Internet connection. But hey it wouldn’t be the first time Google hyped up a produce only to shit can it later when nobody really found it useful.