Chrome OS Laptops will cost 50 dollars and run 20 hours on a battery, and come with free unlimited 3G internet data connectivity.
Chrome OS is not going to be companion to Windows/Mac, Chrome OS is destroying Microsoft/Apple and even Intel.
You will be able to run powerful and free image and video editing software using Native code and hardware accelerations functions of Chrome OS and HTML5.
Chrome OS works offline just as well as any other laptop. Want to write emails while offline and auto-send them when you find a web connection? That is possible. Want to write documents offline and sync them when you find a WiFi? That is possible. Want to watch video while offline? Just connect USB storage and that is possible. I am sure Chrome OS laptops will even come with extra storage and hard drive compartments built-in if you really want to carry a lot of stored data to do a lot of things offline. Otherwise, by that time, there will be Google Drive to store a TB of your personal files for less than 50 dollars per year, thus only slightly more expensive than buying a TB hard drive. And if you will want to store divx or mp3 files on your Google Drive that other users have stored on Google Drive already, you won’t have to actually upload it, a quick scan and a copy is on your Google Drive and storage costs will be shared by all the users who will have access to a copy of the file.
Chrome OS works on touch screens, uses whatever hardware you want. Most importantly, with a 50 dollar ARM laptop the experience will be just as good as on a 400 dollar Intel laptop.
It is simply ridiculous that it has had to be delayed so many years just because the system caters to an outdated system where publishers and distributors make the largest amount of profits from sales of books, newspapers, magazines. Those intermediaries need to go away and authors, artists, journalists need to get 100% of the cut. We need a full subscription plan at $5 per month or less that gives full unlimited access to all works. The EU better vote for this as soon as possible, or it will be crappy piracy vs crappy publishers for yet another bunch of years with crappy output by creators of content.
Google announced Terrabyte storage for 256 dollars per year for Picasa web photo storage. I still think Google has a long way to go. $256 per TB per year is 8x more than the current price of buing a TB hard drive on the open market and using it for 2 years. 16x more expensive if you consider that a hard drive should work fine for 4 years at least.
Google needs to implement fully cold cloud storage. If I want to upload a TB of my personal stuff to Google cloud storage, and that I very rarely need to access that data, Google should store 2 copies at 2 separate locations (if one hard disk fails), but then Google should also be able to turn off the power to the hard drives to 0 power consumption, and the only charge for power usage to resume turning on the hard drives on demand and charge for that power consumption as part of the bandwidth costs, cheaper than $0.01 per GB transfered from and to the cloud storage.
Then for the hosting of popular files, Google would automatically host those on more expensive always on hard drive storage, though the extra bandwidth usage should pay for most of that.
For (mostly pirated) popular video and audio files, Google should do like Streamload once did, only host one copy for all the users who “beamed” it instantly to their accounts. Thus if you want cloud storage for movie and music files that in average more than 1000 other Google cloud storage users are using, th cost for that TB of cloud storage should be less than 1/1000th the TB storage cost per year, thus $0.25 per TB per year, thus free unlimited cloud storage for popular files, financed by advertising. But Google probably needs to figure out some copyright issues before this happens.
For example, if I want 1TB on Google cloud storage today, Google should let me buy about 2x 1TB drives on the open market, at about $80 per hard drive at current hard drive pricing, and have them instantly connected to the Google cloud storage. Thus the pricing should be $80 per TB per hosted unique files per year. And $0.01 or less per GB transfered which includes power consumption costs (could depend also on the bitrate and the sustained transfer rates, bandwith to transfer many small files slowly would cost more than transfering the files quickly).