Choosing Google Chrome OS Or iPad OS?

I was reading a news story this morning about how iPads are eating into netbook sales. And that got me thinking about something interesting; the Google Chrome OS.

What the ‘freak is Chrome OS?

For those of you who don’t know what Chrome OS is (most don’t), Chrome is an operating system by Google. It’s confusing because Google also has a browser (the one I’m using now) called Google Chrome. But the reason why they call this OS Chrome is because that’s basically all the operating system is… the Google Chrome browser.

Chrome OS is an operating system with nothing more than a browser. It can’t, and never will, run any standard programs or apps. It’s meant to run nothing but “web apps”; web pages such as Google Maps, Pandora, Evernote, Google Docs, Facebook, etc.

What’s the appeal of Chrome OS?

So what’s the appeal of Chrome OS? The appeal is that it’s an operating system that’s free for device makers and ideal for netbook devices. It promotes more use of web applications such as Google Docs and less use of programs such as Microsoft Word. It boots in only a few seconds. Netbooks don’t need to be high powered to run fast.

The bad thing about Chrome OS is that you can’t run programs. None… Even the smallest little program, no matter how useful, can’t be run. Ever. That’s the draw back of Chrome OS

Chrome OS vs. iPad OS

Then comes along the iPad. Here’s a device that is sorta’ like a netbook and, like Chrome OS wants to be for netbooks, the iPad runs its own operating system.

There are a lot of differences between the iPad (a device that actually exists) and netbooks running Chrome OS (which don’t exist yet). Tons of differences. But the point I’m trying to illustrate is that they both share two things in common:

1. They don’t run a PC operating system (Windows, Mac, etc.)
2. Users can’t install typical PC or Mac programs

The appeal of Chrome OS is that you don’t need to install programs onto your mobile, light computer to do things, as most of the best “apps” exist on the web, such as Wordpress, Pandora, Facebook, etc. With the iPad, you also can’t install programs that you could on a normal laptop.

But if you were going to take the big dive and choose Chrome OS, knowing you’d only be able to live on the web… why even bother getting a crappy netbook installed with Chrome OS when you could just get an iPad? The iPad has the same problem where you can’t run normal programs, but you can run iPad apps.

Replacing a laptop with an iPad

So most people can’t think of the iPad being able to replace a laptop. But what do most people do with a laptop? They browse the web, watch things on Hulu, buy and listen to music with iTunes, email people, share photos, things like that.

Those things can be done with an iPad. Sure, you can’t access flash content such as Hulu, but you can access a ton of media content from different sources. You can of course access full or mobile optimized versions of web services such as Facebook, but also have a great app to do the same thing, such as the Facebook app. But it’s more than just one or two great apps.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of great apps made just for the iPad (let’s ignore the thousands that are made for the iPhone and can run on the iPad). These apps give this non-laptop-like device much more intuitiveness and functionality than you could get on a laptop alone. Pandora on the iPad is much better than Pandora on the web. There’s a ton of apps that exist on the iPad that don’t exist for laptops or desktops. Check out the Marvel Comics app below to see what I mean…

Why Chrome OS?

But that’s not the point. It’s not about whether or not the iPad can be an alternative to a laptop running Windows or Macintosh, it’s about why choose a netbook running Chrome OS vs getting an iPad. The answer is… there isn’t much of a reason. People are putting down $299 to $449 for a netbook, so for that money I’d much rather just go with the bottom end $499 iPad. Chrome OS really starts to lose its appeal compared to the iPad.

It’s all about price

If Chrome OS is going to be appealing and not seem like a joke, it needs to be placed on netbooks that are cheap. And I mean CHEAP… Not this $299 crap, but I mean like $149. That seems crazy low of a price, I know… but we’re not talkin’ laptop speeds or iPad speeds. Heck, we’re not even talkin’ normal netbook speeds, I’m talkin’ about very weak (cheap) hardware to justify the price tag. After all, Chrome OS is supposed to be extremely light weight. It better be, considering the operating system is running one thing and one thing alone, a browser.

Making a netbook that’s about 1/4 the speed of current netbooks should do just fine for Chrome OS. Sure, it won’t be able to run most flash content very well. It certainly won’t be able to run sites like Hulu, but heck… even the fastest netbooks can’t even run Hulu in full screen without showing some frame rate lag. So you make the price extremely cheap (and the hardware the same). 160 GB hard drive? Pff… screw that. Put in a cheap, 16 GB (or even 8 GB) flash drive, the same kinds that run in iPhones. Chrome OS can’t download any files to the operating system anyways, so might as well make it tiny. Include an SD card reader for extra storage and your set (like current laptop and netbooks have now).

Missing hardware features

A device such as this needs to cut out as much fat as possible. No, that doesn’t mean make it extremely tiny and uncomfortable and joke-like. It needs to be a decent size, hopefully even 11″ (a large sized netbook). But that means fat needs to be cut that most people would never consider to be “fat” but a “necessity of modern computers”. So let’s start cuttin’ us some fat…

No USB Ports: There’s no reason for there to be a USB port or USB hardware controllers, etc. Chrome OS isn’t designed to have devices connected to them. And even if they did have USB, do you think any hardware manufacturers would create drivers for Chrome OS anyways? Forget’a ’bout it…

No Monitor Ports: Wanna’ connect your cheap little device to an external monitor? Nope. No need for that… at all. And any ways, it wouldn’t even be supported in Chrome OS.

No Replaceable Parts: This device shouldn’t be upgradeable. In fact, the RAM and hard drive won’t even have the possibility of being upgraded or changed, same as a mobile phone.

No Sound: “Whaaat??” Yeah, that’s clearly a possibility. At least no speakers. But realistically, it should probably lack all sound to say within a cheap price range.

Expanding the bridge between competition

Now think about that. If you create a device that’s $149 that can go online, check web email (i.e. Gmail), Facebook, Google Docs, things like that and do nothing more, that makes it seem much more different than an iPad. But it won’t be a joke of a device either. People, even if they had an iPad or are considering it, will look at these new breed of Chrome OS netbooks as a great little device. The train of thought would be “It’s only for the web, but it’s great for the web“.

No netbook for me

But as it stands right now, I’d much rather get an iPad than a netbook. If they create a $149 netbook running Chrome OS, things will be different.

Peace, JbB

Google Chrome Is The Fastest Browser On Earth

Google Chrome is the fastest browser on Earth, baby! Don’t believe me? Check out this video and be amazed. This is truly nuts.

Whoh.

Peace, JbB

Google Chrome Full Screen Goodness

Ok, here’s an awesome thing to do. With Google Chrome (my browser of choice, baby), hit your “F11″ key to go into full screen mode. Good, good… that’s full screen, nothin’ new to some people. But, did yo know you can use full screen mode and switch between different browser tabs, all without exiting full screen? Yeah, it’s tight, here’s how ya do it.

Go into full screen and simply hit “Ctrl + Tab”. And bam… you set.

Right now I’m writing this via the Wordpress admin area, while I got Pandora playin’ in another tab (among a few others). Here’s what it looks like.

Look at that full screen goodness. Those are full screen snapshots, not cropped or anything. What’s nice is that, if you got Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can hit the “Start” +  ”Tab” key to go back and forth to different programs without exiting full screen mode. And if you wanna’ create a new tab, just hit “Ctrl” + “T”, as in “Control… Tab! Now!” and you got yourself a groovy ‘nother tab.

I don’t know how to close a tab via command key. Hmm… “Alt” + F4″ is the command key to close a window, so I wonder what “Ctrl” + F4″ does? Yep… figured it out. “Ctrl” + F4″ to close a tab. Nice.

Few more commands at ya, that you outta’ know just because. “Backspace” to go back a page. “Shift” + “Backspace” to move go forward a page.

“F5″ to refresh a page.

“Spacebar” to page down. “Shift” + “Spacebar” to page up.

Google Chrome and full screen… it’s that easy.

Peace, JbB

PC Browser Window Tips For Widescreen Monitors

Ok, so here’s an interesting Windows problem. What happens when you have a big monitor, especially a widescreen monitor, and you wanna’ browse the web? A big monitor typically means higher resolution. That means you have more up and down space to see the page. But you also have more left and right space, and the problem is that 95% of web pages out there have “fixed widths”, which means no matter how much extra side space you have, the web page will only be one particular width. This is even more noticeable on widescreen monitors. So what your left with is a bunch of content in the center of your big ‘ol screen with a bunch of nothingness (dead space) on the sides.

So when it comes to browsing the web, your browser fills up your entire screen even though the web page may only take up 75% to 30% of your screen. But that’s just life, right? No, it doesn’t have to be.

PC Users Can Learn From 27″ Macs

The Apple Safari browser has a feature I really like. Have you ever been on one of those huge 27″ iMacs at the Apple store or at Best Buy? Those ***** are huge! I love’em. Browsing the web on those babies must be a big waste, right? No. When you maximize the Safari, Apple’s browser, it maximizes top to bottom, but it expands left and right only to the size of the web page. There’s a small percentage of people still using older computers set with a low resolution of 800 x 600. Just to give you an idea of how extremely tiny that crap is, 15.4″ widescreen laptops and 19″ monitors use a resolution of 1366 x 768. The largest non-eye squinting resolution, let’s take the 27″ iMac for instance, is 2560 x 1,440. Think about that. Widescreen resolution can go from a width of 1366 to a width of 2560, yet most web pages all have a fixed width of 800. See the problem?

That’s why Apple updated Safari a while back to that if you wanted to maximize a web page, it would maximize the width of the web page so that your entire screen wasn’t filled with the dead space of the web page.

Why Safari’s Maximizing Makes Sense

The reason why Safari does this is because your browser doesn’t do you much good if you can only see one page open at a time on a very big monitor, or can’t see anything else until you minimize. I mean think about it, would it make much since to use a small program, such as the calculator, but have it take up the entire screen? Of course not, and that’s Safari’s thinking on the Mac. People would be less inclined to buy or use a big screened Mac if they saw a tiny web page taking up 100% of the screen.

Using this method, Apple encourages you to have more web pages open on the same screen or to have more things open while you have a web page up. The bad news is that Internet Explore, Firefox and my browser of choice, Google Chrome, all don’t do this. But Windows 7 can help.

Rockin’ Windows 7’s New Maximizing Feature

Take a look at the screen shots taken with the Neonote below. The Neonote is a widescreen 15.4″ Hp Pavalion DV6 runnin’ Windows 7 at 1366 x 768 resolution.

aintageek.com front page.

nytimes.com front page.

nytimes.com news story.

See all that dead space? Now aintageek.com looks good, because the “dead space” is filled with that bad *** lookin’ design I created. But look at the New York Times. You can see the dead space on the home page to the right, and on the story, you can see the dead space on either side. What a waste. It gets even worst on larger screens at higher resolutions.

But with Windows 7, there’s a new feature you can use that’ll maximize just the top and bottom of the window. You resize the browser window so that it gets close to 800 pixels. How on Earth do you do that? Oh, it’s simple. Open your browser, make sure it’s not maximized and go to a web page such as a nytimes.com article and drag the sides of the window in or out until there’s no horizontal bar on the bottom. Drag it out just a tiny bit to be extra safe. Move the window to where you want it, I have mine on the right side of the screen. Then move your cursor up to the top of the window until you see your cursor change to the move cursor and then double click. Your window will now maximize the top and bottom. (This works for all windows by the way.)

The majority of all web pages out there will now neatly fit into this window. Here’s how the same web pages look “top maximized”.

aintageek.com front page.

nytimes.com front page.

nytimes news story.

As you can see, each page not only fits perfectly, the content of the web page didn’t change at all. All we did was guesstimate the size of our window into an 800 width so that we can bring up web pages and, instead of seeing all that dead space, we instead see our desktop or any other programs we happen to have open behind it. Every once and a while, you’ll run into a web page that’s wider than 800 pixels. But the odds are, that page has some garbage ad or something BS that’s stretching the size out. I mean, after all, the content of the actual web page is much, much smaller. There won’t ever be any web pages that’ll have their normal text content be bigger than 800, and if they do, their designer’s an idiot.

Another tip, which I didn’t show in the screen shots, is to Gansta’ Leanin’ Your Windows 7 Taskbar, so that you can take up some of that extra widescreen space at the left and leave more height for windows, such as web pages.

If I help ya out, shout at me in the comments, or follow me at twitter.com/johnBbaird.

Peace, JbB