Have you heard about the tablet that has been developed in India for educational purposes that costs $35? Kapil Sabil, who works for the Indian government’s human resource ministry, showed off a prototype recently and even speculated that the device could cost $10 in a short time as hardware costs decline.

News organizations are reporting this as a laptop; the reality is that this device looks like a tablet. It has no keyboard, doesn’t fold and has a touchscreen. How can that be described as a laptop?

More and more, cloud computing makes hardware a commodity that will matter less than the platform that a device runs on. This comes as Intel recently posted its best quarter ever as companies purchase more expensive servers to handle increased processing that is done remotely now more than ever.

Witness the increasingly short lifespan of the mini-computers that we all carry around called smartphones. Indeed, it almost seems surprising to me that phones are given one-word names: at some point this convention for naming is going to run out of creative ideas there are so many products coming out.

Nevertheless, this Indian device has one purpose: to increase education and literacy rates in India. Would you be surprised to hear that this gadget runs Linux, has a web browser and can allow users to read PDF files?

Sounds like a Chrome OS computer to me.

Lilliputing has a report out that Intel’s oft-pushed around little brother in the semiconductor space, AMD, will be releasing a chip aimed at mobile computers. AMD has always been a lower-cost solution to Intel’s chips, and the release of this chip called Ontario offers both manufacturers and consumers better choice in processors for netbooks and tablets.

This information was provided to investors during a recent AMD earnings call. AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said that the performance and power consumption of the Ontario chip would be comparable to the Atom, although graphics capabilities would be better than Intel’s chip.

While having both the Intel Atom and now AMD Ontario as mobile computing options for processing is good, we’re still convinced that most Chrome OS devices will eventually run on an ARM solution. ARM offers more flexibility when paired with cloud computing and low-power capability than traditional processors.

Noticeably absent from the list of official Chrome OS partners is Intel, although many manufacturers that produce Intel-based solutions are taking a part. There is an overwhelming amount of ARM processor developers on the list such as Qualcomm (Snapdragon processor), and Texas Instruments (OMAP processor). Freescale Semiconductor, an ARM-licensed developer of the i.MX series of processors whose Taiwan office I had a chance to visit while I was at Computex, is also a part of the official list, which must mean something, right?

Asus is working on an ARM tablet that will run either Android or Chrome OS and will be released by its AGAiT subsidiary.

A Google Executive has thrown in his opinion on the AT&T limits on data the company is imposing.

It appears that a Google Music service could be coming this fall, with some exciting features to compete with Apple.

Mobile devices that blur the line between smartphone and computer heat up the competition between Qualcomm and Intel.

Google sure does have a lot of money in its coffers to invest in or acquire companies with.

At Computex, I had the opportunity to talk to Bou Chung Lin, VP & GM of Taiwan Operations for Marvell. While we were going though an overview of the company’s offerings, we got on the subject of cloud computing and Chrome OS. Here’s a quick clip of his response to my questions regarding this.

We know that Marvell has been working on an ARM-based Chromium OS build, as our pal Charbax over at ARMDevices.net showed us earlier this year when the company showed it off running on their Armada 510 processor at CES in Las Vegas.

It will be interesting to see what will happen to Chrome OS in terms of using an ARM based solution versus an x86 one. I’ve heard rumors that Intel is readying a rival to ARM-based solutions, or perhaps start making their own ARM licensed product.

There is no doubt they are going to need to do something after some of the things that I have seen coming from ARM processors comprised of multiple cores that divvy up the duties for a device to separately process system, video and audio functions for mobile devices.

The folks at Freescale Semiconductor were kind enough to invite us to their offices yesterday in Taipei to show off the fact that they are actively working on Chrome OS for ARM processors.

I learned a lot during my time at Freescale, and I now better understand that it is taking a good deal of work to port Chromium over to the ARM architecture as opposed to x86. They had a version of Chromium running on their iMX515 processor that was from last year’s Google open source build.

I happened to have the latest spring release of Chromium on a USB drive in my bag while I was there. However, the build that I had was specifically for x86 and the reality is that a lot of work has to go into making Chromium compatible with ARM’s low power, mobile specific platform.

Here are some pictures that they allowed me to take, giving an indication that they are working closely with Google to ensure that Chrome OS will not just run on Intel processors. My time at the Freescale office in Taiwan yesterday gives me an indication that there will probably be ARM devices running Chrome OS in the first quarter of 2011.

More Chrome OS news will be coming in the closing days of Computex, keep checking our RSS feed or follow us on @thechromesource if you’re a Twitter addict like I am.

There is now a browser add-on for IE, Chrome and Firefox that allows people to opt-out of Google’s Analytics tracking.

The Mac and Linux versions of Chrome browser are catching up to Windows; it was announced today that they have now moved to stable release.

Google Wave has been moved into the Google Apps suite of software for organizations, moving it out of its experimental stage in Labs.

Here’s a look at the challenges that Google TV faces when it enters the market this fall in the U.S. on DISH Network.

Intel will be showing off dedicated chips specifically for tablets at Computex, which starts next week.

Although I’ve been unable to find an official link from Acer, Engadget reports that the company will not launch a Chrome OS netbook soon.

YouTube is now five years old; it serves up more than two billion videos to users everyday.

Scroogle now has its own Scraper Extension in the Chrome directory; allowing you scraped searches anytime you want.

Could Google TV be “the biggest single change in television since it went color”, as Intel chief Paul Otellini has been quoted?

The Android Market has had its website updated a bit, possibly in anticipation of Google I/O on Wednesday.

Do you suffer from “Hourglass Syndrome” while using your computer?

Even though this is a joke for marketing Intel products (and to get people to upgrade their machines), MSNBC decided to pick this up and run with it as as a serious news item. The angle played is that the so-called Hourglass Syndrome causes stress. Intel commissioned a study led by Harris to gather data about how long people have to wait for their computers to catch up with their activities.

“We found that 41 percent of adults said they are waiting for the computer to catch up with them and they are stressing out while waiting,” says Intel’s Agnes Kwan.

Could it be that the problem is not related to Intel, but the amalgamation of software that is running on Intel based machines? I’m not going to point any fingers, but I think that may be the true culprit for computers being so slow.

It seemed a bit surprising to hear that Google would team up with Intel to release a set-top box, in a project that is being dubbed as Google TV. The reason being is that using Intel chips in a box for television is going to be costly, despite the fact that the operating system running the box (Android or Chrome OS) would be free in terms of licensing costs.

Panasonic, which had announced in 2008 that they would partner with Google to integrate their solution into their TVs right out of the box, has decided that such a solution would indeed prove too costly.  Samsung is another company declining any such partnership, instead making the choice to develop an alternative internet TV solution in-house.

It makes one start to wonder how much this set-top box is going to cost. Sure, Sony is game, but they are known to have the highest-end televisions on the market – and they plan on putting the Google platform inside of their TVs. For them, there is little for them to lose if they get involved in the partnership. Plus, they would benefit by having some of their products with Google TV built in as opposed to the set top box model.

The only service provider that has come forward with support for Google TV is DISH Network. There’s relatively little surprise to that move, since DISH plays the role of the underdog, a la T-Mobile for wireless, in the TV market. Problem is, with competition high in this space, it’s going to be a tough sell to get Google set-top boxes in people’s homes without taking a loss on doing so because of the expected price.

So look for Google to make a deal with DISH akin to what it has done for wireless carriers: give up a cut of advertising revenue. Google heading down the path of allowing anyone who wants the capability to put TV ads on a variety of channels, and this combined with search advertising could bring a windfall of profits to both Google and cable/satellite companies. If the only challenge is to get expensive devices into homes that allow this, I don’t see Google or the service providers balking at the cost as long as there are solid revenue expectations down the line.

Just as long as it improves the user experience, overall it will be good to have Google in the television market.

The New York Times is reporting that Google has been working with some technology heavyweights to produce a set-top box that will compete in the digital TV market. Intel is said to be offering their Atom processor architecture which is used primarily for mobile computers like netbooks. While its not quite clear what Sony is contributing, the fact that they sell televisions and are a content provider with their Sony Pictures unit make sense for them. In fact, Sony has been trying to integrate digital TV functionality since 2008.

Interestingly, the Time reports that the operating system that will run on the set-top box will be Android. Yet unlike phones, this version of Android will be capable of running the Chrome browser. This is probably in an effort to allow the box to show content from several different mediums – from YouTube to Hulu and other sites that offer digital content, which incidentally is growing by the day as people watch what they want when they want it.

I wrote an item not long ago about Google’s partnership in testing  their services with DISH Network – where I compared DISH in the television market as what T-Mobile has been in phones for Google. T-Mobile was the first carrier to adopt Google’s strategy by selling phones that ran on Android. I would expect that this announcement is related to their testing of what will probably give people a better user experience while watching TV.

So, is the box going to be a Sony-labeled product? Maybe, but it’s an interesting choice since Sony traditionally does not sell set-top boxes. With the partnership including Intel, expect to see a box that is basically a computer that uses your television as a display – not only showing you television programs but also allowing you to go to web. In fact, the Times article states that that Google and their partners are also working with Logitech to come up with a remote that has a keyboard somehow included on it.

A keyboard? Are we looking at a set-top device that you actually “point and click”? It’s unknown right now. I think the biggest element of this is that the box will run Android with Chrome, which is an open source platform that offers a lot of flexibility. This could be a boon for app developers, as it would give them a larger audience than even the mobile phone market if cable companies are willing to adopt the technology. My guess is that with DISH Network on board, they may not have a choice if the box becomes a hit.