June 28th, 2010
Google has their own operating system that is being developed for Netbooks – call it Chrome OS or Chromium, your choice. I downloaded a version bootable by USB, developed by a very smart 17-year-old. With bootable USB in hand, I was able to get Chrome OS running on my laptop. Here are my first impressions:
Basically, Chromium is Google’s Chrome browser set up as an operating system. When you boot up and login, you are put into Chrome. From there, you can use Google Apps to get your work done via the “cloud.”
There is no way to save things to the hard drive or install native applications. It’s designed that way. You have to have Internet access to do anything.
This might be fine, but in my first attempt to use the OS, it did manage to find my wifi network, but froze on the authentication. It also didn’t seem to like my external mouse much. Ultimately, the system hung and I shut it down. I’ll play with it more later.
I’d say, this is a promising “lite” operating system, if just to have on USB for those times when your hard drive dies and you just want to login to the Internet to check your email. Whether it will be robust enough for daily use remains to be seen.
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July 27th, 2009
Apple is making new enemies apparently by banning the new Google Voice app from the iPhone. Pity.
I was lucky and got an invite to Google Voice back when it was GrandCentral. It’s a free service that gives you a phone number that you can forward to your cellphone or home number. (I guess the plan to make money off of this by charging a low fee for outbound international calls. Otherwise, the service is free.) Your voice mails are emailed or available via a web interface. The best part was you could have the GrandCentral (now Google Voice) number forward to a few phones at a time, which made it a nice number to have instead of handing out separate home and cellphone numbers.
Google took it over and has made some improvements, but in the process has taken away some other features that I liked, such as the fun custom ring chimes that you could attach to your ringer. Bummer. The interface has also gone all “Google,” which is that very scrunched up minimalistic Google email look that I’m not totally keen on.
On the positive, they’ve added voice transcripts, which are pretty buggy but still somewhat useful. Generally speaking, you can get a gist of the message from the transcript, even though the names don’t come through well. On one of my messages, Google translated the name of my friend Craig to Chris Dodd. I was wondering what Senator Dodd might be doing calling me!
You can also send SMS messages through the web interface, which is handy to have if you have text-happy friends and a phone without a keypad. (Wish I had this before I got my Blackberry!) Inbound calls can also be recorded, but I haven’t tried this feature yet.
If there’s one thing blatantly missing it’s fax capability…I would love to have that…I got rid of my JFax number last year because with all the new technology, it was a waste to pay $15/month for a voice mail and fax number that had no forwarding or email capabilities.
I have been using my Google Voice number now for business calls, so I don’t have to worry about people getting my cellphone (if I don’t want them to have it) or changing landline numbers when I move. Once in a while, when Google Voice was still Grand Central, I had a few problems with dropped calls but it was few and far between.
I was excited to install the new Blackberry app for Google Voice, which allows me to view and hear messages directly from my cellphone. Now I might just give out my Google number instead of my cell number.
So why is Apple doing this bone-headed thing of blocking the Google Voice app? I don’t know if they’ve figured this out yet, but the Google Voice number does not replace a cellphone! You still need some sort of outside cellphone or landline to use it when away from the computer.
Apple…starting to act like Microsoft…stupid stupid stupid…meanwhile, Google is out taking over the world.
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