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Keeping Google's Consumer OS Options Straight

Posted by timothy on from the who-would-ever-want-local-storage dept.

According to Engadget, among others, Google is expected to show off the state of the Chrome OS on Tuesday of this week, and perhaps even to show off a netbook running the cloud-centric system. Since many of the things that Chrome OS does are also within the scope of Google's other consumer OS, Android, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written a guide to the differences, as he sees them, between Android and Chrome OS.

3 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Keeping it straight-ish by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I don't know how to reconcile these differences with Sergey Brin's assertion that "Android and Chrome will likely converge over time". Does this mean that all we can say us:
    1. 1) Android is for Phones & Tablets; Chrome OS is for Netbooks for now but they may converge into a universal system
    2. 2) Chrome OS won’t run Linux desktop or Android Apps ... yet
    3. 3) Chrome OS Constantly Updated, but may go into a release cycle later as its capability expands [this isn't really an OS difference anyway]

    Or was the likely convergence prediction premature?

  2. Re:WARNING: Tech writer needs to learn tech! by 91degrees · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Quickly checking something online does actually cover most of the functionality of my netbook.

  3. Re:Straight by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Rather more than that. Android is largely Dalvik VM with some native access to the underlying stock-but-pretty-spartan-linux. ChromeOS offers sandboxed web pages as a sort of "VM" with as yet unknown levels of native access via NaCl, and likely support for certain other applications(PDF reader, Flash, etc.) running natively on what is likely to be the underlying stock-but-pretty-spartan-linux.

    Substantially more architectural difference.