The Google Chrome OS is very exciting and kind of anticlimactic at the same time. Why is it exciting? Because it’s the first serious new OS offering in years. Why is it anticlimactic? Because the Google Chrome browser—all eight versions of it, so far—has been one giant spoiler. The fact is, you almost don’t need a Chrome OS machine to see what Chrome OS is all about: Just install the browser on your current laptop, and you can get nearly the same experience. And what you do on your Chrome OS machine will even be replicated on your Chrome browser on any other machine when you sign in. It’s all part of Google’s idea for the OS that everything lives in the cloud.
Our laptop analyst, Cisco Cheng, will take a look at the hardware in an upcoming article. As a software analyst, however, I was most interested to see what it’s like to work with an OS whose entire interface is browser-based. But since the only way this OS differs from the Chrome browser is the way it interacts with the hardware, I’ll also consider things like startup time, attached devices, the keyboard, and printing.
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