We popped along to Google's London HQ this week to talk Chrome OS, Google's new low-resource Linux-based operating system for netbooks and notebooks. Chrome OS product marketing manager, Eli Lassman, took us through the features of the CR-48 prototype portable which TechRadar saw last week and gave us some background on the imminent launch of notebooks featuring Chrome OS. It's fair to say that the version of Chrome OS we've seen on the CR-48 is not finished. The browser itself is slow, but the real problem is the apps – Chrome OS needs Google to make several of its apps support offline use in HTML5 and replace the functionality lost with the end of Google Gears – especially Google Docs. We had expected Google Docs to have launched its new offline capability by now, and Lassman confirmed the web giant is still working on this. As Chrome OS is ostensibly just a browser interface, Lassman was asked if the OS was too limited in terms of its interaction with the hardware. "The whole focus is on the cloud and the experience [is] better there," he explained. "There will be storage and you can download files onto the solid state drive itself, but the real focus is the cloud, that's where it really comes alive." The OS will also have its own media player – which doesn't currently work – as well as full USB storage support. Chrome OS apps will be available via the Chrome Web Store which is also used in the Google Chrome browser. So far there are 3,700 available.
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