Chrome OS is a WEB ONLY OS. It’s useless without internet connection. How will WIFI ON affect your battery life. I bet your ordinary 7 hours netbook will probably be dead in 3-4 hours with WIFI ON.

They have hired individuals who make their living as a spy in governmental agencies and the likes to help them in their efforts of spying on us.

In fact, that is what their Google toolbar is all about! It digs in to your info on your computer and tracks just about everything you do online. Google also NEVER DELETES ANYTHING anymore and keeps all data they ever collect on you or anyone.

CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT KIND OF POWER GOOGLE WILL HAVE WHEN MANY FOLKS DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL THEIR Operating System????!!!

WOW!!!

People… come on… DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!!! As my father always told me as a kid, THINK before your act!!!

Now-a-days, I think, research and then act accordingly.
If you need to respond to something immediately, go with your gut feeling, but make sure you are reading it correctly by practising using it on all your decisions.

Google CHURNS MY guts!!!

Good Luck in whatever you choose to do!!

Kill windows. no more PC gaming. since google OS doesnt have gaming at all.

just watch it will end up at distrowatch.com :/

In answer to your points about connecting devices using IMAP and POP – I have. But I’m savvy and this isn’t about tech savvy users. This is about average Joes being able to utilise technology simply. Ask the man on the street how to set such tech up and they’d probably balk. You can guarantee that Chrome OS will make things easy.

The fact is that any complaints about Google owning your soul come down largely to a wider quandry about what constitutes fair practice. Advertising is, for good or ill, an integral part of the web experience. Google is, after all, a business, and needs to make money. Personally I don’t buy the idea of Google monitoring your every move. I use gMail, Google docs and Calendar and frankly can’t see why they’d be bothered about my frequent trips to the boozer and going home to see my folks. Naturally I don’t want to sleepwalk into a situation where my data is read, but data protection prevents that.

There’s no escaping that the cloud is the future of personal computing. For the time being though, Chrome OS is going to be all about low power consumption and simple computing. If you like gaming, you can buy a PC for that. There’s no doubt that offering local apps has value. I think Chrome OS simply offers the punter more choice. Surely that’s no bad thing.

It’s good to hear from readers, so please keep the thoughts and comments coming. And remember you can debate the ins and outs over in the Forum too.

1. It’s free. So’s Linux, but you don’t see that on my mum’s computer
2. It has the Google name on it. So what? So did Google Video, Google Finance, Google Answers… etc. etc.
3. It’ll be quick. My Windows laptop takes around 10 seconds to come out of sleep. I don’t remember the last time I restarted it.
4. Google at the cutting edge of the cloud? More like “google are at the cutting edge of sucking you back into the days of the mainframe by convincing you there’s no value in running apps locally”. Forget gaming. Forget occaisionally connected scenarios. Forget connecting your special purposes devices etc. etc. “everything must run in the cloud!!!!” puh-lease…
5. Have you ever *actually* tried to connect Office to an Exchange, IMAP or even POP server? It doesn’t take ages And it looks like you’re advocating shifting off one monopoly player and on to another. “so long as google owns all your online experiences, and knows everything you do online, and owns all your online data, email, docs etc” you can play. Again, do you even think deeply about this before you start tippity-tapping away on your fanboiwriter?
6.I have a solar powered calculator that has a battery life of ‘infinite’. Sure, I can’t do much on it, but look at how long it’ll run for between charges
7. All you are doing is moving the cost elsewhere. Google will own your soul if you let ‘em. Actually, even if you don’t – so long as you use google to search and don’t pay attention to cookies, or you – even WORSE for your privacy – use a toolbar from Google, they own your ass, and will do their damdest to monetise it to the hilt. If you don’t believe me, chuck a packet analyser on your network and watch all the info the google toolbar sends back to the mothership everytime you do something in your browser.
8. Well duh. All it has to do is fire up a browser to get you to the l33t Google cloud, where Google can control and monitor every aspect of your life in fine detail. But that’s ok, because we’re ‘bating* and we don’t think too much about these things (*see Idiocracy 2006)
9. No, it’s for fridges too!
10. It’s open source. Like wow – so cool how Google have all this really cool technology that they build on OSS and then release back into the… .oh hang on, they dont.

Please people – put some thought into this. PLEASE!!!