iConverged

XKCD has a hilarious cartoon on “Estimation”. I just burst out laughing when I read the footnote. If you are a windows user, you will burst out laughing too.

Estimation

After 4 years of serious Blackberry 8700 and 8800 use, my wife convinced me to switch to the sexier iphone. I was pretty wary knowing it is not very good for business usage. However, my wife’s prime interest was to get me off the keypad while driving. To her dismay, I am now an expert fast typist on my iphone virtual keyboard – but I do listen to her and for my own safety don’t thumb responses to email while stopping at a light. Here are my experiences (so far) on what I did to bring my iphone closer to my needs. I have the iphone 32G 3GS. My previous phone was the wonderful, but, well not oomphy BB 8800.

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There has been a lot of posts and flutter on Google’s new purported Chrome OS and how it will be a great battle with Microsoft, how it will confuse and/or kill Android etc. And also, of course, taking off from the Google Blog on Chrome OS “For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies” people are also throwing in “Web OS” everywhere.

I thought I’d write a post detailing my thoughts (technical) on this entire issue.

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So yesterday, Google finally announced it is getting into the “OS” business with Chrome OS.

Similar to Google Wave, this one is also just an announcement (gee, it doesn’t even have a front page yet  )

But anyway, here are my predictions on where this will go:

• The core OS will continue to be Linux based, with a Webkit layer built into the kernel, or, more likely, a priviledged layer (thus making “reaching to the web quicker” as google suggests) [okay, my bad, I did not need to predict this - I re-read their post - they already state "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel"...]

• Even though Google says this is different from the Android initiative, and choice is good, from my perspective, Android is an SDK, while Chrome OS is an “OS”. The former can, and will, eventually ride on top of Chrome OS (in other words, Android SDK will be ported to Chrome OS, which itself will be based on linux) – thereby making Android apps more ubiqutous

• Android will be just one SDK on top of Chrome. Others will be available for environments where Android may not be ready yet (again, the OS vs SDK difference)

• Palm’s WebOS took the earlystep, though not from a general purpose WebOS way, more from mobile WebOS way. There is no question now “Web” close to kernel is going to be a common way ahead for may of these companies.
• Eventually, they will integrate an HTML/CSS/JS programming interface on top that Chrome will execute natively (or, well, faster)
• The usual tools like Google Gears et all will obviously be tightly integrated into their OS layer