Sundar Pichai, VP of Product Management for Google, displays Acer and Samsung notebooks running on the Chrome operating System at the Google IO Developers Conference in San Francisco, Wednesday, May 11, 2011.
AN FRANCISCO: Laptop computers using Google's Chrome operating system will go on sale in June, as the world's No. 1 Internet search engine challenges Microsoft Corp and Apple on their home turf.
The new Web-centric PCs, made by Samsung and Acer Inc, are Google's latest attempt to change how consumers and companies use their computers.
Users can use applications directly on the web
Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome at Google, announces a Samsung notebook running Google Chrome OS during the keynote address at the Google I/O Developers Conference in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, May 11, 2011.
he bare-bones operating system is essentially a web browser that steers users to use applications like email and spreadsheets directly on the web, instead of storing software such as Outlook or Word directly on PCs.
Moving day-to-day functions onto the Internet removes the burden of time-consuming tasks associated with traditional PCs, like installing software and updates, backing up files and running antivirus checks, executives said.
Managing computer will become easy
"The complexity of managing your computer is torturing users," Google cofounder Sergey Brin told reporters. "It's a flawed model fundamentally. Chromebooks are a new model that doesn't put the burden of managing your computer on yourself."