The official release of Chrome OS is still months away, but that has not Hexxeh from churning-out new, better builds and his latest release packs quite a punch. The new build has full Nvidia ION acceleration, automatic-update now works and even the battery life has improved. Also, now you can customize the menu where one can add, delete and move your apps around.

Note that this build does not works in VMWare and you must install it on a physical drive.

[Download Link]

Samsung has confirmed that it is indeed working on a Chromium netbook. Phil Newton, head of Samsung IT Australia said that Samsung Chromium netbook will feature a 10.1-inch display, 2GB RAM, 64GB SSD, 3G and 12-hour of runtime. He further added that it will be similar to the Samsung N210 netbook that also has a 10.1-inch display

This Chromium netbook is rumored to be powered by the new 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor. Expected arrival time is H2 2010.

source

Chrome OS menu which is the first tab is not directly accessible on the Chromium OS. Even it you enter its address, which is http://welcome-cros.appspot.com/menu, you won’t be able to access the Menu. However, there is a workaround –

• Right click on the Google Chrome Browser icon on your desktop.
• Select “Properties”
• Look for “Target”
• In the  ”Target” box, after chrome.exe” put a space, and add the following line of code
• -user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5″ -pinned-tab-count=1
• Now, Click “Apply” and then “OK”
• Now go to “Options” menu in Google Chrome settings.
• Under “Home Page”, select ” Open This Page”
• Enter http://welcome-cros.appspot.com/menu
• Hit “close”
• Restart your Chrome browser
• That’s it

Thanks Kamal for the tip!

Google Chromium OS is an open-source platform and is available to everyone for no cost. The iPad will not only face tough competition from Windows 7 slates, but also Chromium tablets. Earlier this week, we showed you how the Chrome tablets would look like. They will be able to open multiple tabs for multitasking and would be able to edit the office documents too. Here are few reasons enlisted by eweek, why the upcoming Chrome tablet pose a threat to iPad:

Continue Reading

When we first heard about Google considering about brining Chrome OS to the tablets, we thought that it was all nonsense. Now, conceptual designs are being made about how a Chromium-driven tablet will look.

Continue Reading

Apple unveiled their glorious iPad yesterday and it enjoyed a lot of heat from the tech-bloggers as it is nothing more than a big iPod Touch. It even inherits the missing features of iPhone OS too. To name one – inability to run flash content inside the browser. With such a huge con on its side, how can Apple even think of describing it as a netbook-killer? HEre is the quote from adobe flash blog:

It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple’s DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers. And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.

If I want to use the iPad to connect to Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, or JibJab — not to mention the millions of other sites on the web — I’ll be out of luck.

Flash version for the Chromium is in the works as Google does not impose restrictions like Apple does.

source: adobe flash blog (via gadget mix)

MSI Dual screen netbook has two screens, both touchsensitive and will launched sometime later this year. The soft keyboard that is bundled with the netbook has support for haptic feedback, which will give the user, more or less similar feel to that of a hardware keyboard.

In the given picture, it is seen running Windows 7, which means that this netbook is more likely to dual boot with Chrome OS. MSI says that it will sport a battery life of 4-5 hours on a single charge.

Most of the tech blogs are describing the Chromium as a mere Cloud OS and we admit that they were right. Until now. Google is aware of the fact that Apple iSlate will create a huge splash in the tablet world. So, Google has announced that it will be bundling media player with the Chrome OS.

“For example, you might just have a USB key that has a bunch of MP3s on it, so you want to be able to plug that in and listen to those MP3s. There might not be any controlling Web page for that activity, but it’s clearly something you need to be able to do in any reasonable operating system or browser. So we’re doing a lot of work to make Chrome and Chrome OS handle those use cases really well." mentioned Papakipos.

source: solsie

Acer will be launching its Chromium netbook later this year. However, since Chromium OS is still a new player in the game, Acer will be bundling it with their Windows 7 Starter netbooks. Also, Acer Chrome OS netbooks will account for just 10% of total netbook sales.

Acer is prepping a dedicated App Store for its Chromium netbooks that will feature Chrome OS extensions and other online apps.

source: bloomberg and gadget mix

Popular Chromium genius, Hexxeh has unveiled a new faster build of Chrome OS that he is calling as the Chromium OS Zero that brings plethora of enhancements and speed improvements over the previous official builds by Google. Other features include full extension support and better Wi-Fi (reduced Broadcom delay).

Upcoming build of Chromium OS by this famous hacker will include 3G modem support, multi-language support and a new login UI. Support for Flash is also in the tunnel.

The download size of the new build is under 250MB and can be stored on a small 1GB flash drive.

Latest build can be downloaded from here