10 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT GOOGLE CHROMEBOOK

CHROME

      Google has designed Chrome OS keeping the Web in mind and most of its functionalities will be available only if the Chromebook is connected to the internet. Users apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will all be on cloud.

The bare-bones operating system is essentially a Web browser that will guide users to applications like email and spreadsheets directly on the Web, instead of storing software such as, say, Outlook or Word on PCs.

Moving day-to-day functions onto the Internet removes the burden of time-consuming tasks associated with traditional PCs, like installing software and updates, backing up files and running antivirus checks.

As also mentioned before, everything is on the cloud. Hence the laptops will be tightly integrated with Google's "cloud" online services, and will have almost no capacity to store information. Though they will have slots to plug in other storages device users buy separately.

As with the company's mobile OS Android, Chrome software will be free.

Samsung Electronics Co and Acer Inc made the first Chromebooks.Both models will have keyboards, but no hard drives for storage. The machines will be like computer terminals dependent on a connection to the Internet. The laptops come with 16 gigabytes of flash memory -- the kind found in smartphones, tablet computers and some iPods. Google Chromebooks will run on Intel Corp's Atom chip.

While Google has diligently worked to make sure Chromebooks can be used offline, the computing model ultimately relies on being connected to the Internet.


The company claims that Chromebooks will be up and running in about eight seconds. Every time a user will turn it on, the software will check online to see if there are updates, and it will always boot up with the latest version.

In case, there's a failure, for whatever reason, the OS will simply reinstall itself.

Google Chromebook comes with security features such as secure tabbed browsing (called sandboxing), data encryption, and verified boot. According to Google, "Chromebooks have many layers of security built in so there is no anti-virus software to buy and maintain
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