I'm enjoying my role as one of Google's Chrome OS Pilots (no, I am not employed by Google). Chrome OS Pilots are lucky recipients of CR-48 notebooks. Google gave away over 60,000 CR-48s between December 2010 and February 2011 to people picked randomly who had applied to become Chrome OS Pilots and receive a free CR-48 notebook. CR-48 notebooks currently run beta and developer versions of CrOS. These capable notebooks are not for sale but manufacturers such as Asus, Samsung, Lenovo and Sony have announced their intentions to sell CrOS notebooks when CrOS is publicly released around July 2011.
I use my CR-48 for business and personal applications on an almost daily basis. Note that CrOS and therefore the CR-48 are totally dependent on Web (aka Cloud) applications and Cloud based storage for documents, media files, pictures, etc. It's generally agreed that most Cloud based applications will need to have an offline session capability to be truly usable when an Internet connection is not available. The current beta and developer versions of CrOS (and existing versions of Chrome browsers) do not support this capability yet.
A stable production release of Chrome OS will also allow computing device manufacturers to design and produce competitive tablets at a lower cost than tablets running Windows, iOS, and even Android. In my opinion a family of Chrome OS tablets will be a huge commercial success and perhaps a better competitor to current and future Apple iPads than Android (or other OS) tablets. iPads are successfully being deployed in business applications with forecasts of huge adoption in vertical markets such as healthcare, education and finance. Note that most tablets will require wireless connectivity to access ever increasing Cloud based applications and storage options. Here is an interesting article describing the scope of the tablet market in the Enterprise: http://goo.gl/mrM9q
I plan to continue to write about my experiences with my CR-48 notebook and Chrome OS. Your comments, feedback and questions are greatly appreciated. Gabe
No comments:
Post a Comment