When I came to uni this year I didn’t have the internet for about 2 weeks and it was horrible, it showed me just how much I have come to rely on the net and, actually, how useless a computer is without the internet. There were things that I used my PC for without the internet such as playing music, watching DVDs, using Office and image editing/designing. But none of those activities got me engaged the same way talking to friends on Messenger does, educated the way reading the BBC website does or keep me connected the way emails do.
So I should be a huge fan of Google Chrome OS as everything is on the internet, nothing runs locally on your machine. I’m afraid not, there are just too many problems with either extreme of “no net or all net” (my phrase).
With Google’s idea of “all net” there are some major flaws, the most obvious being what happens when the internet goes down, the router drops out, there is a power cut (it will be running on netbooks so they have batteries) or the user is in a location with no internet. Google will provide a lot of “apps” (no true apps will be able to install on Chrome OS, but some websites will act as apps) that will use Google Gears to save the webpage so that the content can be accessed offline. For some cases this will be just as useful as a normal PC but what happens with information/media that is streamed to the device or webpage that don’t/can’ use Gears? The user will be disconnected from them until they get internet access again, dramatically reducing the usefulness of the device.
At least with my netbook I can still work on office and save files (I don’t known if files can be saved locally before being uploaded to the cloud) and I can listen to my entire music collection.Maybe users will be able to save files locally and download their music from some online service to play offline but then isn’t that just like any other PC?
I know the netbooks could come with 3G modules to access the net directly but that is a slow service for an entire PC to be using to be of any use. Also I know from travelling home by train about once a month that internet coverage on 3G within the UK is not nearly as widespread or as strong(let alone tunnels) as it will need to be to allow people to use their PCs whilst on the move.
Another issue I have is that, in the UK certainly, internet speeds aren’t quick enough to cope with above average streaming/downloading demands. This concerns me as obviously with the OS you will need to stream/download nearly everything you want access or edit so I would guess multitasking is limited, not by the hardware or the software, but by speed of ones connection. Playing music, whilst checking emails, whilst downloading a film to watch later and downloading files you need to edit for an assignment just wont be feasible. And those things aren’t out of the question for your general consumer. A final point to make with regards to internet speed is that a lot of people have broadband contracts that have a maximum download/upload limit for a month, something I am sure the Chrome OS would often push to limits or exceed.
One aspect of Chrome OS I am looking forward to is the improved webpages, services and apps and the improved and widespread internet access Google believe we have within a year. If Google think they can replace locally running applications with web services then they must be working on some pretty good ones now and therefore force the competitors to do the same. Things like Twitter’s “Fail Whale” would need to become a thing of the past. I also hope that the internet availability has improved by next year, I think 4G starting to rollout would be far too much to ask.
Well there’s my two cents on Google Chrome OS, what do you think about it?
