The gathering cloud
While tablets have been the hot form-factor at this year's Computex, the technology phenomenon that really underpins them is the cloud. As devices and wireless technology increasingly free us from dependence on the data and resources contained within a device, a whole world of new options open up.
This year Computex hosted an event we haven't been aware of in the past: the Cloud Computing Forum. Among the speakers were Tudor Brown, president of ARM and Sundar Pichai, the Google VP overseeing the Chrome OS project, so the focus was very much on the cloud on mobile devices, as opposed to enterprise applications.
According to Reuters, Pichai announced Chrome OS would make its first appearance in "late fall", from which we will take sometime in November. It looks like Google has been in no great hurry to deliver the browser-based OS as the success of Android has given it the luxury of making sure it's happy with Chrome OS before it's released.
"We will be selective on how we come to market because we want to deliver a great user experience," Pichai told reporters at the event. "We're thinking on both the hardware and software levels."
Opinion is still divided, however, on whether there's any need for Chrome OS, given the success of Google's mobile operating system Android. It seems that Google wants to chuck it out there in order to see what manufacturers and end-users make of a browser-based OS. It's likely that Google will take its findings from having the two OSs in the field and eventually merge them into one.
