Awesome Techs

Apple has just officially announced the Apple iPad, their tablet device that aims to bring the best of the iPhone and laptops to a slim, attractive device.

The result is a very thin, roughly 10-inch (diagonal) device. The hardware is about what you’d expect, considering that we already know how the iPhone works. It supports touch input, multi-touch, swiping gestures, orientation detection, and all the rest of the features that the iPhone made popular with users.

The tablet’s multitouch screen measures in at 9.7 inches, as per the rumors, meaning that it’s got a significantly smaller footprint than the smallest MacBook, but a much larger screen than the iPhone. That’s 9.7 inches diagonal, from screen corner to screen corner. The bezel is a little fat, but this thing is basically a clean slab of display. The screen’s aspect ratio is closer to 4:3 than 16:9, meaning that it’s not a widescreen like the iPhone or a MacBook, and more of a bi-directional tablet. Or, er, Pad. It’s a half-inch thick—just a hair thicker than the iPhone, for reference—and weighs 1.5 pounds. It’s powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, and has 16GB to 64GB of flash storage. From the looks of it, Apple finally got some use out of that PA Semi purchase, and built their own mobile processor. It’s also loaded with 802.11 n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, a 30-pin connector, a speaker, a microphone, an accelerometer and a compass.

The operating system on the tablet is based on iPhone OS, which is in turn loosely based on OS X. In other words, it’s got the same guts as the iPhone, as well as a somewhat similar interface. The browser is essential an upscaled version of Safari Mobile, with a familiar, finger-friendly title bar and not much else. It rotates by command of the accelerometer. Mail again takes its visual cues from the iPhone, but with a lot more decoration: you can preview your mailbox from any message with a pull-down menu, and preview any message from within the mailbox, with a pop-up window.

via : [Gizmodo]

Yes at last Google Chrome OS is coming. Earlier Google had announced that they will launch the first version for the Chrome OS in this fall. Now only 2 weeks left for the end of this fall.

Also some reliable sources have reported this news. So at this time this might be for real.

Google describes Chrome OS as,

“Essentially the Google Chrome web browser running atop the Linux kernel. Intended mainly for netbooks, it will run on both x86 and ARM chips.“

The drivers for different hardwares may exist as this is a brand new OS.

Techrunch Says,

Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers.

Any lets hope for the best.

Namely, the Chromium browser build for Chrome OS (assuming the now forbidden folder on the Chromium.org servers was accurately named) looks like it’s integrating the tab bar with what would normally be the taskbar/menubar of the operating system. As you can see in the screenshot above, the browser embeds a clock in the top right of the browser window, along with “a network connection dialog (non-functional here), and a battery meter (also non-functional).” That would mean, as we’ve suspected, that the Chrome browser would likely be the main, basic windowing system for Chrome OS.

On the other end of the browser window, we’ve got something else to pick apart:

In the top-left, you have what appears to be the new logo (so far I have been unable to find a larger version of that image). Clicking on it opens this Google Short Links window, which doesn’t really allow you to do anything unless you have a google.com email address, which I assume is restricted to Google employees only.

It’s still clearly a major work in progress, and now Google has entirely forbidden access to the folder containing Chromium builds specifically for Chrome OS, but it’s good to get a glimpse at where they’re headed.

Credit: LifeHacker