14 DAY TRIAL // If there were any doubts that Google Chrome is heading straight to tablet devices, they should be dispelled by the recently introduced on-screen keyboard for Chrome. It's only available for Chromium and it's not clear if it's live yet but it's a clear sign.
That's hardly the only recent addition to Chromium, there are many updates under the hood, a new CSS property has been implemented in WebKit and Google Gears is gone forever. You can check out a rather thorough list of updates in the last week here.
The new on-screen keyboard for Chrome looks pretty snazzy. You can check it out here, though it's not functional, it's only a preview of what it's going to look and feel like.
It looks fairly basic, you can switch between the regular keys and numeric or other symbols and there's a voice input button. The recent Google Chrome 11 Beta added support for HTML5 voice input, so it's clear that the browser will soon be much better suited for touch devices with a mic soon enough.
But there's an even clearer sign that Chrome is headed to tablet devices, Chromium is now able to detect if it's running on a touch device and, presumably, adapt to the environment, for example by using the touch-optimized new tab page introduced recently and the on-screen keyboard.
The first Chrome OS devices are coming in a couple of months, but those will be netbooks, unless Google and its hardware partners have some sort of surprise in line for us.
But you can bet that someone out there is already working on a tablet powered by Google Chrome OS. Of course, there are Windows powered tablets as well and notebooks that are touch enabled so support for touch input comes in handy for Google Chrome in general.