If you’re running Android Jelly Bean on your phone or tablet, you will likely have tried out Google Now. If you haven’t then I strongly suggest you do. I’m currently running Google Now on my phone and I love the fact it can always tell me the shortest route home, the weather for my local area and even tell me if I’m close to the coffee shop I Google’d earlier in the week.

It’s easily my favourite built-in feature of Jelly Bean, and a killer feature for anyone trying to choose between an Android or iOS device right now, but this might not be the case for much longer!

Earlier this week a YouTube video (now removed) appeared showing a very realistic looking advert for Google Now for iOS. Then around the same time Francois Beaufort, a French web developer found pieces of the Google Now puzzle hidden in a development version of Chromium suggesting Windows and Mac OS users could also be getting some Google Now love.

True to form, Google is keeping quiet about both the video and the Chromium leak, but with so much evidence it sure is hard for them to deny.

[ Source ]

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Chrome OS. It’s the platform that is behind the ChromeBook, but don’t you think it would be an even better solution for tablets? Sure, there are already tons of Android tablets out there, but Chromium might be a more suitable fit. And the video below demonstrates exactly what a Chrome tablet would look like.

Web developer Francois Beaufort found a “hidden” touchscreen interface within Chrome OS, so he thought he’d give it a try. Tinkering around in the open source operating system, he activated touchscreen mode by adjusting export GYP_DEFINES=”touchui=1″, then running the standard “gclient sync” to revise the tarball.

And the net result looks pretty good. The touchscreen keyboard is similar to Android, you get larger menus that are more finger-friendly, and the regular option and navigation buttons are easy to tap too. This is an early build, but I’d imagine that with some tweaks and fixes, Chromium could have some serious tablet potential. To the cloud…

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