14 DAY TRIAL // Google pushed a Chrome OS dev channel update earlier this week only to pull it when a rather serious bug was discovered. The update will have to wait until the bug is fixed, but there were some interesting things listed in it.
In particular, support for screen rotation and UI scaling are an interesting addition considering that Chromebooks or even the Chromebox don't really need them.
Yet, the update explains that all Chromebooks will support screen rotation. This GigaOm takes as a hint that Google may be working on a tablet, perhaps something akin to the Microsoft Surface, based on Chrome OS.
Rumors about Chrome OS tablets are as old as the operating system itself, but there may be some truth to this.
Screen rotation doesn't make much sense on anything but a tablet. No one is going to hold their laptops on the side and expect them to work properly.
One use case could be an external monitor that supports rotation, but there can't be more than a handful of Chromebook owners who would find this useful, fewer actually need it.
Google has certainly been adjusting Chrome OS and Chrome itself to touch input. But that may simply have to do with support for Windows 8 or the Chromebook Pixel.
But Chrome won't work on a real tablet, even one with a keyboard cover. It simply wasn't designed for that and it would take more than a few tweaks to get it to fit, it would take a redesign.
That said, there is already a Chrome for tablets, the Android version, so at least conceptually Google already has a tablet-optimized Chrome. But the actual Chrome UI is built on the Android APIs and libraries, meaning it would have to be rewritten for Chrome OS.
But the real question isn't whether a Chrome OS tablet could be built, it most certainly could, but rather whether it should be built. We'll probably find out soon enough.