Google’s Chrome Tablet Concept Revealed

After last week’s iPad announcement by Apple, Google has been playing around with a similar web-tablet concept for Chrome OS. It went up on Google’s development site Chromium last Monday, two days before Apple unveiled iPad. Google’s User interface designer for Chrome OS, Glen Murphy, blogged about the tablet concept on his personal blog yesterday.

So far, this is just a concept of Chrome OS’s touch interface, but Telegraph claims that Google is already in talks with HTC, the handset manufacturer behind Google branded Nexus One and countless other Android powered handsets.

“Although Chromium is not an official Google website, the concept video has been put together by Glen Murphy, one of Google’s Chrome OS designers. Google is also reportedly in discussions with Taiwanese consumer electronics giant HTC about making a touch-screen tablet computer. HTC already makes many of the mobile phones that run Google’s Android operating system, and designed and built Google’s own-brand handset, the Nexus One.”

Chrome OS was initially meant for the netbooks and this concept could very well mean they could be considering the possibility of scaling their new operating system to touch input based tablet computers as well. Meanwhile, companies like HP are already working on their own tablet computers.

Chrome OS tablet actually sounds like a neat idea, if at all it ever sees the light of the day. Since hardware manufacturers like Dell and HP would very soon be rolling out their own iPad killers, it makes sense for Google to support touch input devices for Chrome OS.