We’ve already discussed the muted reception Apple received to the unveiling of its long awaited iPad tablet , and could Google be about to show the Cupertino company how it’s done?
Its Chromium developer channel has announced a video and images of a concept UI for tablets built upon Chrome OS, its impending free Cloud-based platform, and the results are highly impressive. Equal parts practicality and Minority Report, Google notes the key points as:
*Keyboard interaction with the screen: anchored, split, attached to focus.
*Launchers as an overlay, providing touch or search as means to access web sites.
*Contextual actions triggered via dwell.
*Zooming UI for multiple tabs
*Tabs presented along the side of the screen
*Creating multiple browsers on screen using a launcher
The video below shows off these features best, and it certainly demonstrates what can be done to fuse a desktop and mobile experience. Interestingly, Google’s demo also makes extensive use of multi-touch – a technology it had recently shunned until yesterday’s new firmware ‘2.1-update1′ brought it to the Nexus One.
Of course, there’s a long way to go between concept and reality and even the tablet hardware shown is purely theoretical. Still, while many had expected Apple’s design expertise to finally win over the doubters to the tablet format, it seems the creative minds at Google are actually on course to do a better job…
Gordon
