While the first leaked, or fake, screenshots pop up

Jul 9, 2009 09:49 GMT  ·  By

Google dropped a bombshell yesterday with the Chrome OS and the Internet has been alight with speculation, praise and critic. The views are as diverse as they come, some hailing it as the future while others predicting it a failure. But with the many questions surrounding the product Google has decided to answer some of them, giving out a few more details.

One of the many concerns was that hardware manufacturers wouldn't carry the product, saying that, even in the netbook market where Linux has been somewhat more successful, people just want Windows and the OEMs know it. So Google announced some of the partners it was already working with, Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

The names pretty much talk for themselves, with Adobe meaning Flash support and Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo and Toshiba all being large netbook manufacturers. Freescale, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments are chip companies that Google is most likely working with for driver support, which is a main concern for the new OS. This should actually prove beneficial to the Linux ecosystem, especially the kernel, even though most Linux enthusiasts and companies are less than happy that Google chose to develop its own OS rather than support an already established distribution.

But the official information isn't going to satisfy the public's appetite so there are already a couple of “leaked” photos of the new OS showing up. The story goes that Google demonstrated a private build to an Acer parts supplier that was able to take a few fuzzy photos. Apparently the OS was pretty snappy, as one would expect, and sported some feature-geared search, like navigating the file system in a “browser” mode. Of course, the screenshots could easily be fake and with the huge interest there certainly is enough incentive.