If the rumors are true and Acer does show off Chrome OS hardware at Computex Taipei 2010, the largest computer exhibition in Asia that starts on June 1, it’ll be a world first. But it’s not known for sure if Acer will be running Chrome OS on a netbook. Maybe it will be a tablet. And, it might be just a tech demo, showing a beta version of Chrome OS.

Whenever Chrome OS hardware finally ships, the world is ready for a lightweight OS with a seven-second boot time, accessing its apps in the cloud with a simple, free interface. If it’s a success, for many users who just need an operating system that stays out of the way, the answer to the perennial question “Mac or PC?” will be “No.”

Can’t wait two weeks? Check out http://www.netbookpack.co.uk

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Apple started taking early orders yesterday for its tablet, even though no one’s really sure what they’re buying.

Friday morning, the fool’s parade started. Apple is taking online “pre-orders” for its iPad tablet, which is supposed to begin shipping on April 3. Buying a new kind of product sight unseen is foolish. Especially given how mysterious Apple has been on what the iPad can do and what restrictions on capabilities and media access it will place on users and content providers.

Why blow $500 to $830 on a device that may not be what you expect? Just wait a mere three weeks to see for sure what it actually does and what surprises, good and bad, Apple has packed into the iPad.

Don’t get me wrong: The iPad concept is promising in many ways. And I have no doubt that the iPad will appeal to many people even if it’s not perfect. But we’ve all seen promising product demonstrations that resulted in major letdown when we finally got a hold of the real thing. Why take that chance? After all, the first-generation iPad is particularly likely to have disappointments, as it’s the version that will tell us what, after the hoopla dies down, Apple should have done.

Sure, we can expect Apple to make future innovations in the iPhone OS (which the iPad uses) available to the first generation of iPad devices through OS upgrades — as Apple has nicely done for iPhone and iPod Touch owners. But the iPad’s hardware isn’t upgradable, so you’ll be stuck with the iPad’s relatively low amounts of memory and its lack of connectors such as USB that I would expect Apple to remedy inthe future. And you’ll be stuck with whatever iTunes-based content locks Apple decides to place on media content and e-books.

Remember, the same thing happened with the iPod Touch, Apple’s iPhone-based PDA. The first-generation iPod Touch could play only a few sounds and even then only at a whisper, so its calendar alarms and new-email alerts were useless unless you wearing its earphones. You couldn’t change the volume without using the touchscreen — a real issue when driving, jogging, or carrying groceries. There was no microphone, so you couldn’t take voice memos or use services like Skype. (Apple even blocked external microphones from working on it!) Despite Apple making sure each iPhone OS revision has continued to support the first-generation iPod Touch, those hardware limits remain in the actual devices.
You can bet that similar types of issue will be discovered in the first iPad.

Maybe I’m wrong — maybe the iPad will be the full “magic” that Steve Jobs promises. Wonderful! If that’s the case, buy one when you know it really is magic — after people not employed by Apple have had a chance to really use it and put it through its paces. Until then, why send Apple your money until you know for sure? Doing so would be, well, foolish.
One positive sign in all this iPad hoopla: One of my breathless local TV news stations had its tech reporter at an Apple Store Thursday night hoping to find people lined up to camp out so they could be first in line Friday morning (at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time, 5:30 a.m. Pacific) to order an iPad — the station was clearly hoping for the kind of lemming-like frenzy we saw for Windows 95 (remember that?), the first iPhone, and for fan-driven movies like the “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” and “Harry Potter” franchises.

But guess what: There was no line. Sure, it looked like a few people were willing to go online first thing in the morning to order their iPads sight unseen, or even head to an Apple Store before work today to order one. But only a few. Maybe the infamous Jobs reality distortion field does have limits after all. (Yes, I know you can’t pre-order an iPad at the Apple Store. Clearly the TV station’s anchorwoman didn’t know when she asked the on-the-scene reporter if people were lining up already. And I doubt she’s alone in that misimpression.)

A fool and his money are soon parted, the saying goes. Let’s hope most Apple fans are as smart as they claim to be.

Google’s open source king Chris DiBona talks Chrome OS and Android-powered microwaves

During a visit to Google’s London HQ Dan Grabham grabbed some time with Chris DiBona.

He’s the Open Source Programs Manager for Google, overseeing everything the corporation does that’s open sourced and making sure it’s “correct and useful.”

He talked Google Chrome and, later, Android. Dan put to DiBona the issue that if users buy a netbook, they still tend to expect Windows on it, so will they take to Chrome OS?

“Yeah. Windows or Mac. Is this going to change? We’re going to find out. We’re willing to say, you know what, let’s give it a try, let’s see if it works.

“We think it can, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it. For some people it will be for an auxiliary machine, for others it might be a primary machine. But we’ll see. And the only way to know is to try it.

“People haven’t really tried small, thin, practically disposable computers. There’s still this regret if a computer breaks. We want to make one where that’s not the case… so if you leave it on a plane… you’re not worried about your data. It’s a different approach. And if someone’s going to do it, it might as well be us.”

Encouraging open source projects

DiBona has a wide-ranging role, and is also responsible for Google Moderator, the polling locations API.

“My whole job is about making it easy for engineers to release software,” he explains. DiBona seems relaxed and is happy to talk candidly about Google’s work on Android and Chrome OS. “[My team] helps with the licence strategy from the very beginning. When you use as much open source as we do, you can screw up and we don’t want to do that.”

“We have been [encouraging open source] as much as possible. Then you have bigger projects where open source is a key part of the strategy, such as Android and Chrome OS where we feel making it open source helps drive the platform at a speed we haven’t seen before.”

“You can especially see this with Android – devices are coming out all the time that we know nothing about, and that’s pretty great. Sometimes we know about them and just don’t have the time to help.”

The Android strategy

So how does DiBona feel that Google can keep Android partners close? “We feel that if we continue to execute and make a very good mobile operating system then as those people create new devices [developers will]… stay close to what we’re doing because we’ll continue to move the platform forward. It will pull all the fragments and little forks with it.”

Some devices provoke amusement: “At CES we had a microwave running Android and it’s like ‘really?’ Obviously we’re not going to optimise the environment for popcorn! Ostensibly you could run an app on a microwave I guess.

“[Android is] a young operating system but I think we’re doing OK. ”

We asked DiBona what he felt about a potential conflict between Chrome OS and Android now that Android has started to appear on some netbook-type devices. Does he think it’s confusing?

“It is yes. See Android is really not targeted at netbooks. I don’t think you’ll see a lot of Android netbooks… that are commercially targeted. Chrome OS is very different… it’s optimised for that kind of experience.

“It’s a different approach towards getting online. A very stripped down approach. A very web approach. It gets out of your way and says ‘here’s the web’.”

Asked DiBona how Google seems to be able to release products such as Android so quickly in comparison to other companies: “Well there’s no reason for it to be slow. A lot of companies get wrapped up in how software is valuable and for Google software is valuable because of what it allows our users to do [as well as external developers].”

by Dan Grabham

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The Google gang has gotten down on its knees to apologize, offering tweak after tweak to its Gmail-centric service. Still, plenty of people aren’t too pleased with their automatic enrollment in a program that invaded their inboxes.

Now, there’s an easy way to bid Buzz adieu once and for all.

Me, I’m in the camp of those who are pretty much ready to tell Buzz to buzz off. In the hours leading up to Buzz’s official debut, I had optimistically hoped the service would end up providing us with a way to manage our existing social media connections — centralizing something old, rather than creating something new. Instead, as I’d feared might happen, Google’s Buzz is really just adding more noise into an already buzzing area of my life.

Now, as any regular readers know, I’m fond of many of Google’s services (I’m even bordering on becoming an Android fanboy, according to a highly scientific quiz I just took). I use Gmail to manage my numerous e-mail addresses and accounts. And that’s precisely why I’m ready to say bye-bye to Buzz: Privacy considerations aside, the last thing I need is yet another social networking site to keep up with when I should be working. And the last place I need it is in a Web site that serves as one of my main productivity tools.

Getting Rid of Google Buzz

If you, too, are ready to swat Buzz away, here’s how: Surf over to Gmail and sign into your account. Scroll down to the bottom of the main inbox screen and look for the link that says “Turn Off Buzz” — it’s at the very bottom of the page, just above the copyright notice.

Thanks to Google’s most recent set of changes, that link now leads you to an expanded menu of Buzz-specific settings (here’s exactly what it looks like). You’ll find options to control whether your Buzz “following lists” are displayed on your Google Profile page, to remove Buzz-related content from your Gmail page, and — if you’re ready to fully pull the plug — to disable Buzz altogether.

The Buzz-busting option deletes anything and everything Buzz-related from your Google account: your public profile, your connections, and any posts you may have shared. You’ll retain the option to re-enable it in the future — a small “Turn On Buzz” link will appear at the bottom of your Gmail inbox screen — but all other signs of Buzz will be banished, one might say, to infinity and beyond.

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The post is riddled with choice words and phrases like “concept UI,” “subject to change,” and how the device “might look,” which also came paired with the rumour igniting phrase “under development.” Those two magical words have our brains pondering the possibilities, but beyond our flights of fantasy, here is what Google’s official tablet experiments have entailed.

Have a look here:

According to the post, the Chromium team is testing a touchscreen user interface that includes these key points:

• Keyboard interaction with the screen: anchored, split, attached to focus.
• Launchers as an overlay, providing touch or search as means to access web sites.
• Contextual actions triggered via dwell.
• Zooming UI for multiple tabs
• Tabs presented along the side of the screen
• Creating multiple browsers on screen using a launcher

For those unfamiliar with Chrome OS, it is Google’s new web-centric mobile platform for laptops and netbooks. Chrome OS is unique in that unlike Windows or Mac operating systems, it is designed specifically for web applications, reducing the emphasis on localized software and replacing it with cloud-based programs. In other words, Chrome accesses programs and user data that reside on a web server, alleviating strains on internal processors and making accessing said information on a wider breadth of devices.

More important, there are more than 7 Mill netbooks out there, waiting to be upgraded. And the solution is around the corner. Netbook Pack – a slick version with the same functionality, available today. Maybe 2010 becomes a different OS race altogether. But – tablet PC or whatever you want to call it- Can you see any student reading a book without listening to music? So we are back to Chromes OS, the fast emerging market of the netbook and the software which makes best use of it. Like Netbook Pack, a Chrome OS version ready for your netbook today.

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Basically, this transforms Google Docs into a file storage system. Actually, I already store a lot of my files through Google services. Most of them are online as Google Docs-format documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. I’ve also found that it’s convenient to store many of my non-Google Docs files as attachments in Gmail, especially if they’re documents that I’m working on with other people. But of course email isn’t really built for that purpose, and there can be a lot of hunting for the right attachment. Now you can use Docs to store and share files in any format, such as a Microsoft Word document or a PDF. Files can be up to 250 megabytes in size, and you get up to 1 gigabyte total storage for free. Now Chrome OS or systems like Netbook Pack can store any file, which was a previously impossible.

This should also make Google a more effective competitor against collaboration tools from companies large (Microsoft Sharepoint) and small (Box.net). Microsoft Office is really the standard format for business documents, so the fact that you had to change the format in order to use those documents in Google was probably a dealbreaker for many companies.

But even though Google now allows you store these new formats, it hasn’t built much collaboration functionality around them. Google Docs really is just a file repository — there’s no system for multiple team members to work on a Word document, the way you can with a Google Docs-format document. There’s no a file checkout system, either, which would at least ensure that only one person is working on a document at once.

Bangaru added that his team discussed the possibility of a checkout system, and would definitely consider adding one if it’s a big user request. Google is also working with partners who want to build on top of its storage services. For now, you can use Google Docs as the backend storage while you synchronize and collaborate on files using Memeo Connect or Syncplicity, or share tasks and documents with Manymoon. Google wants to build “a nice ecosystem” of other services building on top of its APIs, Bangaru said.

Get your Netbook Pack here.

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