Google Chrome OS

As some of us might already know, Chrome was announced today as not just a web browser anymore, but a fully fledged operating system. Designed for netbooks primarily, it boots quickly and takes you straight to the Web in under a few seconds. Essentially, it’s a cloud-based operating system, so that nothing is really stored locally, or at least not exclusively. Even when something is stored on the hard drive, it’s synced up to the cloud, meaning that Google has hold of all of your information, pretty much all of the time. Hmm… I dunno about that. The jury’s still out for me as far the Cloud goes. Honestly, I like to have some things on my hard drive – the hard drive that cost less than a penny a gigabyte whereas not that long ago such an amount of storage didn’t even exist. I like to know that my music is always going to be my music, my pictures will always be my pictures, and my apps will always be available to keep me working and/or entertained even if I’m trapped in a concrete school building somewhere, where Internet connections are slow or non-existent. Keeping my whole life in the Cloud just doesn’t sit well with me – I want some things to be mine no matter what, and as much as I like Google and Flickr and Twitter and all of those other cutesy company names out there, I can’t say I trust them 100%.
Now, I do realize that Chrome is not intended as a primary desktop OS and it shouldn’t be. It’s a nice idea for small gadgets, as long as there’s an Internet connection wherever you go – I’m thinking that there’s a lot of places you can go where that might not be possible, making your gadget a doorstop. At least with iPhone/iPod, if you can’t get wi-fi or cell service you still have some native apps that you can work with.
I did find a video that sums up how Chrome works rather nicely, and I would like to have a chance to see it in action sometime. Whether I’d want to use it all the time is yet to be determined, though.

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