One tablet per day
It's no secret that Google and Apple are on collision course in the smartphone space, with iPhone and Android vying for smartphone OS supremacy. But the launch of the iPad created a new battleground for the two companies, as Google is developing another OS that it expects to be used in the mobile Internet device category, called Chrome.
While Google could never hope to match the hype and publicity of the iPad launch, it waited less than a week to sneak out some renders of how Chrome would allow a special user interface for, you guessed it, tablets.
These images actually come from the open source project behind Chrome, called Chromium, but they seem to have been produced, at the very least, in close collaboration with Google. Here are some of the concepts they claim to explore:
- Keyboard interaction with the screen: anchored, split, attached to focus.
- Launchers as an overlay, providing touch or search as means to access web sites.
- Contextual actions triggered via dwell.
- Zooming UI for multiple tabs
- Tabs presented along the side of the screen
- Creating multiple browsers on screen using a launcher
UPDATE - 16:15, 2 February 2010: We just read a report from Reuters that Google has started advertising the Chrome browser in newspapers and on public transport in London Paris and Amsterdam. It's thought that this move to traditional advertising has been made in anticipation of the browser ballot screen Microsoft will be introducing in Europe.