With Google gearing up for the launch of its first ChromeBooks by Acer and Samsung, the company has no plans to expand the OS to other devices.
Reuters reports that Google's senior VP for Chrome, Sundar Pichai, told a news conference during Computex that Chrome OS will be focused solely on notebooks and will not be expanding to tablets or merging with Android in the foreseeable future.
"Chrome OS is a computer model designed with various form factors in mind, but we are entirely focused on the notebook form factor for now. We have no other plans at this time," Pichai said, adding that the number of Chrome users doubled over the last year to 160 million.
Google may be focused on the notebook form factor at the moment, but the company earlier this month showcased a Samsung-developed “ChromeBox” desktop machine.
Pichai said that Google had set up a "Chrome center" in Taiwan in an attempt to lure additional hardware partners.
With the first ChromeBooks going on sale in a few weeks (June 15), analysts aren't sure the unadorned OS can revolutionize the market like Android did with smartphones. "The danger is that the Chrome PC just kind of falls between the cracks - not quite a smartphone/tablet and not quite a full OS laptop," Steve Hodgkinson, IT research director at research firm Ovum, told Reuters.
Meanwhile, Google has been stepping up its rhetoric against Microsoft as it prepares to take it to task on its home turf. Google co-founder Sergey Brin remarked that Windows was "really torturing users."
