Could a Chrome OS Phone Be In The Works?

May 31st, 2011 by - Nicholas Greene has wrote 210 articles for us.
News, Smartphones

Been a pretty interesting rumor going about lately. Fellow named Anton Wahlman, a reporter writing for The Street, published an article last week detailing why he believes Google is working on a new breed of smartphone. And it doesn’t run on Android- it runs on Chrome.

Wahlman provided an in depth analysis of the reasons he believes a Chrome OS phone isn’t just a possibility, but an inevitability. Over the course of this analysis, he focuses on three primary elements- security, cost, and competition. The trouble is…not all of his arguments hold water. Just the same, even though he does tend to bend the facts a bit, he does make a rather compelling case- mostly owing to his third point. See, he claims that the Android platform is very open, and insecure, but…that’s just not the case. The reason a lot of Android phones are insecure is because people root them, they jailbreak them to allow open source software. That’s not so much a fault of the developer as it is a result of consumer actions. As for his second point….

 

Yes, a Chrome OS phone would be far more cost-effective than a standard smartphone, but the main problem with that is the omnipresent data network. See, even with infrequent browsing, data plans can easily take a sledgehammer to your wallet. Could you imagine if one’s phone was constantly eating up wireless data? A phone that operates completely on the cloud would devour data- and your wallet- unless Google could come up with some sort of solution. Then again, the extra cost of data usage could well be counteracted by the savings made on hardware. But either way, reduced cost isn’t by itself a ‘make or break’ reason for Google to have a Chrome Phone in development.

The more compelling of his reasons is competition. With rumors that Motorola has a cloud phone in development, and Samsung confirming that they’re working on one…well, for Google not to be at least considering putting a Chrome OS phone into development would seem a huge oversight- one that simply isn’t like them. And given that the mobile market seems to generally be shifting towards the cloud…well, the prospects seem good. Wahlman thinks it likely that a Chrome OS phone could arrive by 2012 or 2013, and possibly make use of Google’s White Space project- assuming they ever put that into practice. As for what Google’s said on the matter….

“Chrome OS was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of form factors. We expect to see different partners build different kinds of devices based on Chrome OS, but for this initial release we are targeting the notebook form factor.”

So…they’re neither confirming it nor denying it. Yep, sounds about right.

 

(Source: The Street, Android And Me, The Chrome Source)

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