Thought Chrome OS was for basic web grazing and word processing in the cloud? Think again: we’ve just seen a smart-book running Google’s new OS, and Qualcomm’s FLO TV service airing happily away on it, with some other brand new features. Magazines over the air, without the need for 3G? Of course!
We’ve been fans of Qualcomm’s subscription based mobile telly service, FLO TV, up until now, but how it runs on this Quanta smart-book (last seen with Android)running Chromium, the open source code behind Chrome OS, is nothing short of sensational.
It still chucks TV over the air, but supplements the live TV broadcast with extra information. We saw a demo of FLO TV grabbing Twitter conversations around the programme we were watching, and nabbing sports results for the rest of a league while we watched a football game. All delivered through the FLO TV network, not through 3G.
That means you don’t need a web connection to get extra information, and it doesn’t end there. Qualcomm can also push on-demand content to FLO TV revivers, and that doesn’t just mean telly shows.
Quanta Android smart-book: hands-on photos!
We saw a demo where FLO TV dished up digital copies of magazines. Click on one, and it opens to show the magazine in full, but it isn’t downloaded via the mobile network or Wi-Fi, it’s pushed to your laptop through the FLO TV receiver. Netbook-makers or mobile operators could use FLO TV to deliver magazine or newspaper subscriptions, pushing new content out to the device as it becomes available, not when the device chooses to ask for it.
Now, imagine that capability in, say, a tablet. FLO TV just got even more exciting.
Out TBC | £TBC | FLO TV
