Today at Google’s I/O conference, Google Senior Vice President of Chrome Sundar Pichai announced that Google and its hardware partners would start selling Chromebooks through retail stores. The current lines of ChromeOS-based devices from Samsung and Acer will be sold by Best Buy in the US and by Dixon in the UK.
The second generation of Chrome OS devices, including three Chromebook portable devices and Samsung's Chromebox "desktop," were released three weeks ago. Pichai said that Google is working with Intel and other OEMs to develop additional ChromeOS-based devices, with the target of delivering them in time for the holiday season.
Pichai said that Google has released a new version of ChromeOS every six weeks, automatically deploying updates to Chromebooks since the platform was launched last year. Google has been slowly giving Chromebooks more offline functionality by integrating Google Drive—including the ability to cache files locally on a Chromebook's small solid-state disk. Offline capabilities are also built into Google Docs and Gmail.
That integration took a step forward today as well, as Google announced the availability of offline editing of Google Docs documents with automatic re-synchronization when a user goes back online. During a presentation on Google Drive, product manager Clay Bayor said that offline access to Google Apps presentations and spreadsheets is coming soon.
The Chromebook news came along with a series of other announcements about Google Apps, including the arrival of Google Drive for Apple iOS devices. Bayor demonstrated the iOS version of Drive on an iPad, showing off two new features of the Drive service: text search and image recognition search within scanned documents and images stored in the cloud. He also demonstrated collaboration on documents from within the Drive for iOS app, adding people to a document file and showing off joint editing.
