Some of the biggest news to hit the technology world in a while just seemed to appear out of nowhere the other day, when Google announced the inevitable: they’re making an operating system. It’d been rumoured for a while, but Google are quite good at keeping secrets, so there was no real evidence that it was going to happen, until they made the announcement on their blog the other day. The name? (Google) Chrome OS.

Google announce their Chrome OS

In the days of the rumours, some even went so far as to make a Linux flavour that worked with a Mac Style Dock and only performed internet based tasks. The name of it was gOS. The website never made it very clear what the “g” in gOS was meant to stand for until just a tiny bit of disclaimer at the bottom of the website popped up, claiming that the “g” stood for “good”, crushing the rumours.

Back to the real Google OS. They’re are a web based company, so basing the operating system on the internet seems like a very smart move, which does beg the question: what if I’m not connected to the internet? Does the entire system buckle?

A few days after the press release, Google also announced a list of hardware partners who were prepared to make devices that would work with Chrome OS. Among those, was the chip maker ARM, British company who are just about the Intel of mobile computing. A lot of chips that go into mobile devices such as the iPhone are ARM chips. So announcing them as a hardware partner could mean one major thing that tackles the problem of always being connected to the web: an always on internet connection using mobile networks. (more…)