14 DAY TRIAL // For a long time, Google has been saying that there's plenty of room for both Android and Chrome OS and that the two operating systems are vastly different and address vastly different needs.
It may be harder and harder to maintain that rhetoric though, as more and more clues point to Android venturing out of the mobile space and into more and more devices.
It's been happening for a while, Google TV, while sporting an x86 Intel chip and the Google Chrome browser, is based on Android. Third parties have also slotted Android into netbooks, for example.
But it looks like Google may be soon going down that road, or at least is thinking about it, judging by a patent application for translating touchpad events and gestures into touchscreen gestures.
The technology would make it easier for users to run Android and apps built for Android using conventional peripherals a multi-touch trackpad in this case.
"Touchscreen devices allow a user to provide direct interaction with a computing device, while trackpad devices typically provide indirect interaction that has been modeled from mouse-based interfaces," Google's patent application reads.
Interestingly enough, Google first applied for this patent in 2010 and then updated the application last September.
"This disclosure describes techniques for mapping trackpad interactions and operations to touchscreen events without the use of a touchscreen user interface. For example, a computing device (e.g., mobile computing device, desktop device) may include or be coupled to a pointing device, such as a trackpad device, but may or may not be coupled to a separate touchscreen device," Google explained.
Android 4.0 already lays the groundwork for different types of devices and peripherals attached to them.
While the patent may make it seem like Android on laptops or netbooks is a real possibility, a much more likely application, one that is already in the market, is dockable tablets like the Asus Transformer, which come with a built-in trackpad.