14 DAY TRIAL // The rumor mill has recently spurted back an old whisper. What if a Chrome OS was secretly in the making, but everything was kept under wraps?
For the past four years, speculation about Google building a Chrome OS tablet have been appearing and disappearing like the wind.
The search giant went as far as to tease a design concept back in early 2010, but nothing consistent was heard of afterwards.
There have been other details prompting this speculation. Google has been consistent in providing updates to improve the overall Chrome touchscreen experience and it’s highly unlikely the search giant is actually targeting Chromebooks with this, as the laptops can function perfectly well without a touchscreen.
The rumor mill considered Acer as a good candidate for bringing the world’s first Chrome OS tablet to the life. After all, the PC maker has been struggling when tablets are concerned and the company would need a “disruptive” slate to make a come-back.
On the other hand, Acer Chromebooks seem to be selling quite well, being responsible for keeping the company’s PC shipments afloat.
And since PCs sales are failing in general and tablets are on the rise, why wouldn’t Acer want to cumulate the best of both worlds in a single product?
However, I personally believe that if Google would ever want to bring a Chrome OS tablet on the market, it would release it itself.
Which brings me to the mythical next-gen Nexus 10 tablet. The tablet has been in the rumor mill forever and we have been expecting it to arrive with every major occasion, including Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, CES 2014, MWC 2014 and so on.
Even so, the tablet failed to shows its fabled face, but the rumor mill still abounded of speculation regarding it. The latest report claimed HTC will be taking up the production of the new Nexus 10, which will be a high-end product.
Earlier, new Nexus 10 was said to be coming out of LG, but this theory was soon invalidated. Afterwards Asian sources claimed the next-gen Nexus will be making an appearance at CES 2014 with Samsung as manufacturer.
Most recently, I told you last week Google update its Chrome OS and one of the new things added seemed to indicate towards the possibility of a tablet.
The change log read “onscreen keyboard which allows you to type and use device features (top row) with a pointing device.”
The onscreen keyboard has existed for some time in the developer channel for some time now, but the fact that feat has been bundled within the newest stable version of the OS aimed for the general public, is a big deal.
As I argued above, a touch keyboard is pretty useless on a Chromebook that comes equipped with a physical keyboard. Or it might be just wishful thinking here? Time will tell.