OK - it's Christmas

I'm not ashamed of it!

Our BNI Chapter is one of the top in the area but we do like to be a bit unconventional at times. So here is the video gleaned from our special "Panto" breakfast last week. Enjoy it or don't.

Chrome OS - first impressions are lasting impressions!

There has been a lot of buzz around the release of a new operating system from Google and this week saw the first Beta being made available to the community for review. Downloading a VM build from the excellent gdgt.com I loaded it up in VBox in anticipation of seeing a slim and quick OS with new features that would really get the industry talking. Well I think it got us talking but maybe for the wrong reasons.

To get it to work at all I had to allocate double the memory of my VBox XP implementation. And while the build is under 800Mb, admittedly a quarter of the size of my XP SP2 build, it clunks along at a snails pace and crashes after about 5 minutes. Perhaps I'm being unfair, this is after all a very early beta release, but I do not think Google are doing themselves any favours in releasing this until it is at least a stable build.

As for the OS interface itself, well here is a screen shot for you:

Well blow me down if it isn't a Chrome Browser with an extra tab that has link icons to online Apps. If you're a Google Apps fan and use Gmail etc. then the integration is actually quite good, you log in to the system using your Google Id and it connects you directly to your mail apps etc.

But it isn't really an Operating System as we all know it. You cannot browse your local disk drives, save any files locally or attach a variety of hardware devices. You cannot install local applications or store Music/Photos/Movies to play offline. The sole purpose is to give you a gateway to a completeley online world.

The only OS like controls I could find were hidden away in the top right corner. A battery meter and the ability to turn network connections on and off. There appears to be nowhere to set personalised stuff like Language and Keyboard, screen resolution etc. And if you were to turn off the networking, well then you'd have an OS that does not actually do anything. And that is the problem really. While Google and others would like us all to move more rapidly towards the cloud computing model, where nothing is stored locally and all your applications run online, the quality of internet access, and to a certain extent the Apps available, is just not there yet. Even with my 50Meg Virgin connection, opening and editing a Doc in google docs is like wading through treacle compared to using Word 2007 on Windows 7. And if I can't get online I can't do any work!

The truth is, at the moment the Chrome OS offers nothing that cannot be achieved through using a Chrome browser on another OS. And with many excellent options available (such as OSX, Ubuntu and even Windows 7) all of which give us a choice of how we work, what browsers we prefer and where we store our documents, I'm not sure that Chrome will survive if this is all it does. Even the Android Phone OS does more and I would be loath to buy even the cheapest of netbooks that did less than a phone.