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Chrome OS Support from Qualcomm

Posted on 08. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in News

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs announced at CES today that the company will be supporting Chrome OS as an operating system for future developmental projects. Their ARM-based chip architecture, known as Snapdragon, is focused on providing solutions for mobile devices that go beyond just the cellphone/smartphone market. Qualcomm has claimed that Snapdragon can support a device with a 12-inch screen.

The Nexus One, Google’s first Android phone product in a partnership with HTC, has a Snapdragon processor. Qualcomm showed off a Asus Eee PC with Snapdragon running Android at Computex in Taipei six months ago. The project was then put on hold, but that’s probably because Google was going to announce the release of the Chromium source code, which they did November 19. A machine like this would do better with Chrome OS than Android.

The Eee PC in the video is also fanless, as the technology does not use much power and thus doesn’t produce a whole lot of heat. That’s pretty cool:

Although the news is not surprising since it has been clear for a while now that Google intends to back devices that have ARM technology that usually is used in phones, Qualcomm supporting Chrome OS tells me that the market sees potential in using Chrome over Android for cloud applications. This further proves to me that Chrome OS is going to be loaded and sold on devices that break the mold of the traditional netbook genre – there will  be devices that are smaller and offer very little other than the ability to get on the internet. And they may not support a full-on keyboard either. We shall see.

Tags: android, ARM, Asus, Chrome OS, Computex, Eee PC, Google, HTC, Qualcomm, Snapdragon