Google’s Chrome OS seems to definitely be much more directed at netbooks and notebooks, while Android seems to be much more useful for the company’s vision of tablets. Linus Upson, the engineer director of both Chrome OS and Android, said in an interview that the company views the Chrome OS as “very focused on laptops.” This statement basically means that devices with a keyboard will be receiving the new OS.
“From a Chrome OS perspective, we’re open source, you can look at everything,” continued Upson in the interview. “We’ve done a whole range of mockups across a wide range of form factors.
“We are very focused on laptops,” he added. “From a Chrome OS perspective, we want to nail that experience. We spend most of our time on laptops, and we want to make sure that this experience is awesome. From a computer science perspective, however, it scales across many different classes of devices.”
The Vice President of product management at Google, Sundar Pichai, formally announced the Chrome OS Beta launch on Tuesday at an event in San Francisco. While there, he described Chrome OS and Android as “two different approaches to computing.”
Google has not officially announced which form factors would receive which operating system. As of right now, on Google’s Web site dedicated to discussing different form factors of Chrome OS devices, a “touch UI” for tablets is being described as “under development.”
Right now, Google is moving forward with their “Honeycomb” project. The Honeycomb is Google’s new version of their Android operating system for tablet devices. Just a few weeks after Google released its Nexus S smartphone at the Web 2.0, Andy Rubin, the vice president of engineering at Google, showed off the company’s Motorola tablet featuring Gingerbread at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference.
Rubin said that he felt that tablets “represent a fundamental change in the way computing works.” He continued saying that users are allowed to physically interact with tablets so they “removed a degree of abstraction.”
Tablets are a wonderful phenomenon that have caught on like wild fire. It’s exciting to see the developments that Google is making, and it will be great to see the things that the company will have to offer in the future.