Chrome OS

Google's Chrome project aka Chromium runs for their Chrome Browser and Chrome OS. Loving its browser, I thought of checking out the OS. 

Downloading image
Google Chrome OS, is available only via their partnered OEM's hardware. Hence to try out, how it looks and what's the experience, I started googling around. Chromium OS & Google Chrome OS, share same code base with an exception of later having additional packages to ensure better experience on its partnered OEMs hardware. Chromium OS can be downloaded, compiled & executed. Avoiding all that tricky steps, I looked for readily available image. 


Though not much of information available, but whatever available; all pointed towards hexxeh. They seem to be checking out latest version of Chrome OS available on public domain, build it & release a installable image for end consumers. 


Installation

• I started with its Vanila variant. 
• Downloaded & copied image to the USB drive through image writer. 
• Plugged USB in to my old HP Laptop (running with 512 MB RAM, Intel Pentium Dual Core processor). 
• Booted computer from USB. Saw Google Chrome's logo with text 'Chromium'. Got excited !!!
  NOTE: Google Chrome OS has green/yellow/red logo, while chromium OS has blue/bluer/bluest logo. 
• After few minutes, saw initial screen asking for KeyBoard Language, Network connectivity.
  NOTE: Unless, I connected ethernet cable, I could not proceed. For some reason WiFi option was not available. 
• Next step to configure Google Account. I gave my existing Google account credentials and it started syncing contents.
  NOTE: For security reasons, secondary encryption password is prompted before sync can be performed (which can be found in google account dashboard).
• Upon syncing & configuring, I was asked to select my logic profile picture (It also pulled up my Google+ profile image). 

Experience

Applications installed on Chrome Browser (via Chrome browser App Store) popped up as my applications on the machine. All most all this applications works in browser & hence they worked here equally well. I do not have that many applications installed to have detail analysis on the same. 

File Manager: File manager is part of the browser, where all files are visible. UX looks very similar to Google docs listing all files in a collection. 

Printer: Printer on cloud. I haven't tried it, so can't comment. 

Settings: Could see Ethernet, WiFi, Keyboard, trackpad settings. Again not as a separate application, but all under Chrome Browser page. 

Other Info: I could see my computers battery status in bottom right corner. Could not see other hardware or similar details. 

Summary

Honestly, as this was not an official Google Chrome's OS image; but a similar variant - It gave me a basic feel of what the OS is all about. An operating system, with a home page and all applications hosted (or embedded) in a browser. Data pulled from my cloud services and processed locally (where-ever applicable). Certain services have support for offline data availability to ensure work continuity especially when no or limited internet connectivity. 

Google's official Chrome OS, has pre-bundled extended package like Adobe Flash, Adobe PDF, Google Talk client, 3G Cellular support, etc; which makes the entire OS better. 

For users, who can get their all major work done on a browser (Mail, Doc processing, Financial, Image & Video Processing), it seems to be a good option. But hold on - Do one really needs to buy a new hardware for this? May not be... We all use browser in our regular laptop / tablets. Then why a new hardware? May be a trimmed version of hardware like a tablet or ultra books seems to be a good fit.  

I'll definitely look forward to use ChromeBook soon. 

Google Currents

Google launched currents, for US region only. Thank you to google search, it helped me to find an off-line installable copy of currents to download & install it outside US. On downloading, the 1st time setup has been quiet smooth to get few default Libraries & trends. This helped me in understanding the potentials of this application.

Library: The moment I added my Google Reader feeds into library, it was a Bonanza. Now, I read all my feeds from currents [Bye bye google reader]. Offline sync of the contents with configuration of accessing only over WiFi / 3G is beauty. It saves me on my 2G data-plan bill. What i miss is some indication of new un-read notifications within the Library. Even it misses showing visual distinguish between read & un-read articles.

Trends: I can add categories of trends I'm interested. It ranges from news to science, technology to sports. Once selected, I get good feed of what's trending now. On each topic selection, I'm happy to read the story headline from major vendors. It's impressive to see 3 sections of each story - Stories, User Generated & About; giving 360 degree perspective on the information.

1. Stories are more of content publication agencies, 
2. User generated content is scrawled mostly on videos generated by users, and 
3. About links more to generic information sites like Wikipedia & similar. 

Trends mark read articles with grey titles vs black bold titles for un-read. One minor usability bug is when a detail news is read & returned back to trend page, it scrolls back to the top [instead of where I browsed into].

Today, I thought of exploring how to create a publication & created my edition. Following through the template flow of linking an RSS / embedding a google doc, I could create my first edition within few minutes. I could also test it live on my android device by loading content from Google servers within minutes. This has been really impressive. I'm loving it.

In summary, though there are few bugs & improvements required - I'm hooked onto this client. I'll look forward for this client to be available outside US.