Google I/O 2011 - Day 2 (Google introduces Chromebook)

Following are the highlights of the second day at Google I/O:

• Chrome users increased from 70 million to 160 million.
• Voice recognition support for Chroms web browser. We really need to see how that shapes out in the future. In addition to that language translation facilty added to Chrome so it can translate to the language supported as you speak.

• Now here comes the big one, the introduction of the Chromebook. This one is the complete cloud based solution and the hardware will be developed by both Samsung and Acer. The Chromebook will have instant turn-on and it will be up and running within three minutes. Everything is cloud based so that you can access anything anywhere. $429 in the US for the WiFi Samsung model, $499 for 3G. $399 for the Acer. It will be available here in the US on June 15th through Best Buy and Amazon. Six more countries included for the same release date -- Spain, France, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Italy. More good news, Chromebook will be jailedbreaked from day one so that you can hack and tweak the kernel. Google will be promoting the Chromebook like crazy and it seems Google is having big plans to launch Chromebook in the corporate world. Chromebook will be available for small businesses for $28 (per user) monthly subscription and that will include software and hardware and services – whoa!!. To promote Chromebook in education $20 per user for schools and government organizations and will include same services as mentioned above.

• Another big announcement was on the gaming front. Angry Birds will be coming to the Chrome web browser. This will be a sweet tie up between the creators of Angry Bird i.e Rovio and Google. The game can be cached and can be played offline as well. New game levels called Chrome Dimension added specially for Chrome.

With all these incredible announcements it has been a very wild and amazing ride for the last 2 days and it seems Google is really about to change something in this year’s I/O conference. We all have to wait till 6th June when Apple’s WWDC (world wide developers conference) will start. With no iPhone release set for this years WWDC let’s see what Apple has to offer in its developers conference. I am pretty sure Apple’s latest OS X - Lion will be among the many things Apple will share with all of us. I am already excited and I hope so are all of you.