In their constant strive to outperform and eclipse Apple’s gadgets, Google has provided a possible peek at what their rival tablet computer may look like. To develop the tablet, Google is reportedly teaming up with Taiwan-based HTC, the same company it worked with to create its Nexus One phone.

The images, which popped up this week on their Chromium site, reveal a glimpse at how Google’s OS would work on the tablet. The photos were reported to be developed by Glen Murphy, the company’s UI lead on its OS and browser. It features a configurable keyboard, zooming functionality, and resizable windows that can be altered by dragging your fingers across the screen.

The Google Chrome tablet concept designs showcases a range of touchscreen tablet PC features, including a range of touch-screen keypad configurations, including a split keyboard with keys assigned to left and right hands.

Read full @ source with images

Step 1: Download and install the latest version of VirtualBox for Windows 7. (download link)

Step 2: Download .vmdk file for Google Chrome OS. (from gdgt)

Step 3: Start VirtualBox and click on “New” button. This will start a wizard that will help you create a new VM in VirtualBox.

Step 4: Name your VM “Chrome OS” and select “Linux” from Operating System dropdown menu, and “Other Linux” from Version dropdown menu.

Step 5: Assign your VM some Ram in megabytes. For this tutorial, I have allotted Chrome OS VM 512 MB of Ram.

Step 6: Now Select “use existing hard disk” option and select the .vmdk file of Chrome OS that you downloaded in Step 2.

Step 7: Click Next and finish the wizard.

Now simply click on the green colored “Start” button as seen in the screenshot above and wait for about 7 seconds for Chrome OS to boot up. You will need a valid Google ID to login into the operating system.

In July we announced that we were working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

We want to take this opportunity to explain why we’re excited about the project and how it is a fundamentally different model of computing.

First, it’s all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn’t trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we’re going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.

Most of all, we are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds. Our obsession with speed goes all the way down to the metal. We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS.

There is still a lot of work to do, and we’re excited to work with the open source community. We have benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit and many more. We will be contributing our code upstream and engaging closely with these and other open source efforts.

Google Chrome OS will be ready for consumers this time next year. Sign up here for updates or if you like building your operating system from source, get involved at chromium.org.

This is the case with most of Google’s softwares now, like Google Earth, Google Talk and most important of all, Google Chrome Browser but I cannot live without the standalone installer, even though I am on high speed Internet, downloading isn’t a problem for me, I just like it the other way.

I am sure many of you, esp. those on slow speed Internet would like to have a direct download link to the standalone installer which can be used to install Google Chrome without the hassles. Well, here you go:

Direct Download Link to ALWAYS Latest version of Google Chrome

I do not want to post a link for each version of Google Chrome just yet. Above link is directly from Google, it will always have the latest stable release version of Google Chrome. You can just click above, then check the box for “Accept and Install” and the download for standalone installer will start.

Leave your comments and let me know what you think of this.

When you mention Google in conjunction with any upcoming tool or service it tends to draw some attention. When you put Google in the same sentence with ‘new operating system’–directly challenging Microsoft in a market it has mercilessly dominated for decades–the rumor mill kicks into high gear. Vegas may even be taking odds.

For all of the speculation and rumors, there is little that is really known about the Chrome OS. There have been fake Chrome OS downloads, spoofed screenshots, and a seemingly endless stream of hearsay and conjecture based on virtually nothing.

Hopefully that will change today when Google shows off a demo of the current state of Chrome. Ironically, whether or not Google will use the press event to announce availability of an early beta of the operating system is also a point of speculation. It seems safe to assume that we will at least know more about the Chrome OS than we do now.

Read full at source

Complete Overview And Launch Plans To Be Revealed

Google is planning to hold a special Chrome OS event at its headquarters in Mountain View, CA this Thursday morning, we’ve just been notified. The plan is to give some technical background information as well as show off some demos, we’re told. More notably, they will be giving a “complete overview” of the new OS, which they say will launch next year.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS will be speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards. As we reported a few days ago, Google had been planning to release at least part of Chrome OS this week. That still may be the case at this event, but it looks for now that the more complete launch will in fact take place next year. And if they are holding this event now with a “complete overview,” progress is clearly being made, so you can probably expect that launch to be early next year.

Google first announced Chrome OS in July, but gave very few details about it. It seemed the idea there was more to drop a nuclear bomb on Microsoft, which was just about to announce its online free version of Office. In the subsequent months, interest has remained high for Chrome OS, but about all we’ve seen is what the OS’s browser may look like.

Via [Tech Crunch]

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

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