google

The newly released Google Docs app for Android smartphones and tablets has more than just editing and viewing documents up its sleeve. It also allows you to snap a picture of a page of text with the camera on your device, and it will OCR and convert it to an editable document. 

Obviously, it can’t work its magic universally … handwriting, and complex fonts are beyond machine text recognition. But this takes us one step closer to being able to do Interlibrary Loan from a cellphone. 

It isn’t often that one becomes excited about pagination, but when it’s a feature that makes Google Docs even better, I suppose it’s time. Today, Google announced that word processing documents in Google Docs will display pagination, accurately representing printed pages in the style of Microsoft Word and other word processors. I know lots of students will be excited to finally be able to tell when their 3-page paper is done, without having to do a print preview. 

Google and Sprint are getting cozy these days, having made two big announcements today. The first is a major phone announcement, the Nexus S 4G for Sprint. It’s a “Google Experience” phone, running the stock Android 2.3 Gingerbread experience and includes a WiMax radio for an actual 4G experience in the markets where Sprint has that service live. 

The second announcement was the integration of Sprint phones with Google Voice. This is the first time that full Google Voice abilities have been available without porting our number to Google. This is a big deal, mainly because it was never even a possibility before, and it will be interesting to see if Google extends this possibility to other carriers or even to standard telephone service.

Google today announced the launch of Google OnePass, a flexible payment subscription service aimed at publishers who want to have recurring payments for content. This seems to me a response to Apple's recent announcement of their subscription service for the iPad, since OnePass allows for web-based subscriptions to mobile devices.

It will be curious to see which publishers decide to go with the Google model, and how it will effect library purchasing moving forward.

Google enables mobile printing for Gmail and gDocs via its CloudPrint service for any of its supported mobile platforms (Android 2.1+ and iOS 3+). This means that you’ll be able to print using these services from your Android phone, your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to any printer attached to your Windows 7 PC. Clever, and potentially very useful, especially as the tablet form factor becomes more central in offering library services.

Conclusion

I sat down with my new Cr-48 with one goal in mind…use it until I couldn’t. That is, try to see how much of my normal computing life I could handle just in a browser, just in the cloud. The answer, in the beginning was just not that much. That wasn’t a fault of the Cr-48, or of ChromeOS, but of my own predispositions and expectations about computing. As I mentioned in my Overview section, the metaphor of “just a browser” really took me some time to wrap my head around. Once I reworked my assumptions about how this computer-shaped-object was supposed to work, it became much easier to just Do Work on it.

And overall, I was able to get quite a lot done. I’m definitely on the early-adopter side of moving to the cloud: both of my books, all of my articles and blog posts (including this one), and pretty much every other piece of text I create lives in Google Docs until it has to go somewhere else. I sync my Outlook calendar to Google Calendar, and I use Gmail for my primary email address. So the move was much less difficult for me than for someone not already used to working in the cloud….for someone still tied to saving files locally, organizing folders, or use a lot of non–web based programs, this would be a very difficult computer to begin using.

The final grade for Google’s first attempt at a ChromeOS machine is quite a mixed bag. Here’s my breakdown:

Loved

• Nearly–instant on
• Ridiculously fast resume
• Keyboard
• Battery life

Didn’t Like

• LCD
• Resolution
• Rethinking my computing experience

Hated

• Trackpad

There is a lot of potential here, both for users and for Google. If ChromeOS becomes widely adopted, the benefits for users are huge: always having your computing environment with you, automagical syncing of all your data, better security, faster web experience. For libraries, if you aren’t providing a lot of customized software for your patrons, and the majority of their use is of the web browser, ChromeOS could solve a lot of your IT headaches. Even if you do need non-browser software, Google is working with Citrix to provide SaaS over the web in a variety of ways, and the potential for doing something with virtual machines over the web for those use-cases is becoming a reality. Google is betting big here, and as this technology matures, I’m not sure I’d bet against them. We’ll see what the next year brings, but ChromeOS is definitely something that libraries should be watching.

Performance

The Cr-48 itself is a capable computing platform. The highlights of the performance are definitely in startup and resuming from sleep. Since it’s operating a very lightweight operating system, and using solid-state storage to do so, you can go from Off to working in about 12-15 seconds. If you simply close the lid and put the Cr-48 to sleep, resuming is as instantaneous as the backlight of the LCD coming on. The browser itself is quick, although I have had some startup delays as it tries to negotiate a network connection.

Loading and dealing with websites doesn’t seem to phase the processor, although as you start cranking up the resolution on videos, you can see things start to stutter. Moving to HD video on YouTube, for instance, really gave the hardware some trouble…standard definition video wasn’t any problem, though. While I can imagine there are obscure plugins that aren’t supported in ChomeOS, there is one massively popular site that simply doesn’t work with the Cr-48: Netflix. Netflix streaming works with Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin, which isn’t available for Linux, and the ChromeOS browser has no way to handle this limitation. I’m sure that Google is talking with Netflix about this, but until they move to some form of HTML5 video streaming, it’s just off the table. Hulu has some problems as well, but this is due mainly to the poor Flash support for Linux.

Dealing with more pedestrian web fare, creating documents, even editing photos in Aviary was no problem. There’s a ton of things that ChromeOS handles just fine, and I was able to do quite a bit of work on it. The hardware performance while working was average. I love the keyboard, as it is reminiscent of the chiclet-style of the current Macbooks, but the trackpad needs some firmware love quick. It’s just very quirky, and had trouble recognizing two-finger taps much more often than I’d like. I’d give the keyboard an A grade, while the trackpad gets a D…overall, it’s like that kid in class that gets average grades, but could be really good if they just put in a little more time.

Up next: Conclusions

Google has launched their own ebook store, in direct competition with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other commercial ebook stores. There are a number of really interesting pieces to the books in the Google Book experience, such as:

• Books anywhere you have a browser
• Mobile apps for iOS & Android devices
• Works with any Adobe Digital Editions compatible eReader (Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, etc)

For me, this is a much more interesting eBook experience than the B&N store…the only thing that has parity with this is Amazon’s Kindle. With the standardization on Adobe DRM ePub files, Google is using most common combination of filetype and protection…and books that are not currently under copyright are provided DRM free. As a matter of fact, since the DRM decision is made by the publisher, if the publisher decides to release the ebook without DRM entirely, they can do that. That’s huge moving forward as the eBook market matures.

Consumers now have yet another option in the eBook marketplace, and libraries have yet another competitor in the hearts and minds of patrons. Hopefully we can find ways to make it work for us, and not against us.