Google held their Chrome/Chrome OS event on Tuesday, and one of the highlights of the event was the launch of the Cr-48 Pilot Program.  The Cr-48 is essentially the first Chrome OS notebook, essentially a beta product that they are releasing to testers around the country to help evaluate Chrome OS before its proposed Spring 2011 launch.  It’s unclear if the notebook was built by Acer, Samsung, or some other partner, but what has surprised many as the units started arriving is how refreshing the styling is.  Look at that picture at the top, there!  It looks like one of the old black Macbooks, a simple design that Apple fans wish was still available for the plastic Macbook.  The lack of branding might seem dull to some, but it’s pretty hard to make the case that this doesn’t look better than practically everything being put out by Acer, Samsung, HP, or Dell (with the exception of Dell’s Adamo line).

The sad irony is that this notebook screams “prototype.”  When it comes time for Acer and Samsung to to release their own devices, let’s all hope that Google has a hand in hardware design.  We find that unlikely, though, and this notebook will recede into the background as a fondly-remembered launch device for Chrome OS.

And really, that’s too bad.  Seriously, why don’t all PC laptops look this sensible?

In football, there is the phrase that, “if you have two quarterbacks, you actually have none.”  This refers to the lack of confidence a team may have in one player to lead them forward.  This idea is beautifully reflected in the tablet marketplace today, with companies lacking any definite direction in what OS to put on their new slate-style machines.  According to Digitimes, Toshiba is going to release three tablets in 2011 and intends to show them off at CES in January.  What’s crazy but not surprising about this, of course, is that these three tablets will all have different operating systems.  Digitimes claims that they will independently run Windows 7, Android, and Chrome OS.  This sort of distracted and fragmented approach for a company almost guarantees that none of them are going to be that impressive, especially since the Android tablet is the only one that has a realistic chance of succeeding.  Windows 7 has been proven to not be a useful or compelling tablet OS, and the thought of navigating Chrome OS through a touch interface that is reliant on tabs sounds like a nightmare.

As much as one could heap scorn on Toshiba for this half-baked approach, it doesn’t seem to be unique among the more nondescript PC makers who are struggling to differentiate themselves in the approaching post-PC era.  Just last month, Acer announced similar plans to release Android and Windows 7 tablets, hoping that something will catch on.  For manufacturers used to shipping PCs in boxes that contained the same components, these are difficult times.  If a company is not a software company, they are going to either be let down by Microsoft in the short term or ship Android tablets with no help from Google until next year.  This is why HP bought Palm, to give them a credible mobile, touch-centric OS.   For companies like Acer and Toshiba to use all three operating systems, it shows a lack of confidence in any of their options and in their own products.  Until they can build their own systems or have better direction from Microsoft or Google, expect these types of half-hearted attempts to continue for a while.

Some sanity finally seemed to win out Monday at the Web 2.0 summit as Eric Schmidt revealed that Chrome OS notebooks are still on the product road map.  More specifically, he seemed to acknowledge the growing confusion about whether or not Chrome OS was going to be targeted for notebooks or tablets, something that hasn’t been clear at all in the more than a year since Chrome OS was first announced to the public.  Just recently, there were a number of reports that Motorola would be releasing a Chrome OS tablet on Verizon for the holidays, though that plan seems to have fizzled with the holiday shopping season in full swing and the presence of the iPad and Galaxy Tab in Verizon stores.  Schmidt did, say, however, that Android is their operating system “optimized for touch” and that it would essentially be their tablet strategy in the near-term.  This, of course, makes far more sense than using Chrome OS on tablets, as the tablets would have been limited at best in consumers’ minds and not built from the ground up to support touch.

When you look back at early demos of the first Android prototypes, it’s questionable how much they intended to build in a touch framework at the core of the system, but at the very least Android is a fully-functioning touch operating system on smartphones today.  It only makes sense that a tablet in today’s consumer market would support native applications anyway, as web apps have not caught up and this space is currently defined by the iPad.  While Google’s goal is certainly to move all applications to web apps, there are battles lines that seems to have been drawn between Apple and Google on whether this should happen, and certainly when it should happen.  This could be part of the reason that Google is behind in shipping Chrome OS notebooks as they try to find a way to increase the functionality of a browser-only and web-only operating system.  The other reason Google is likely making the choice to put Android on tablets is a sheer issue of economics.  Chrome OS was always intended to be a low-cost netbook product at first, something doesn’t seem to be possible with 7-inch Android tablets and the 10-inch iPad both carrying a $500 entry price ($500 is a WiFi-only estimate based on the fact that the 3G Galaxy Tab is currently hovering around $630 at cellular carriers, the same price as the 3G iPad).

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