The latest Hexxeh build of Chromium OS, includes a nice surprise for anyone looking to squeeze a little HD video playback out of their mini-laptop: support for the NVIDIA ION chipset.
It now supports hardware acceleration through an NVIDIA Ion chipset and should get both basic support as well as added performance in those areas that can use the faster-than-usual graphics. Battery life has also increased and is matched by proper support for automatic updates.
The specialized Chromium build can boot entirely off of USB and needs a 2GB or larger flash drive if it isn’t installed on a computer’s own hard drive. It’s not said if the improvements made to Flow will be rolled into the main Chromium OS branch. Google is unlikely to add Ion support into Chrome OS itself as it already has strict requirements for which hardware will work with the platform, although it may still get GPU support as it software has referenced NVIDIA Tegra processors.

Via netbookchoice

While the official release of Google Chrome OS won’t be arriving for a few more months, Hexxehcontinues plugging away at his Chromium remix — and his latest release is better than ever.

Codenamed Flow (I’ll assume because of the epic Vanilla Ice line “Flow like a harpoon, daily and nightly“), the new version adds loads of new functionality. The automatic update feature which was recently beta tested is now baked-in, more hardware is supported (including full NVidia ION acceleration), battery life is improved, webcams are now supported, and numerous bugs have been squashed.

Perhaps the biggest addition is the customizable menu, where you can now add, delete, and organize your favorite web-based applications. It’s a significant step toward making the Chromium OS feel like a real desktop replacement.

Right now, Flow is only available as an image file for writing to a physical drive (the download link is at the bottom of this page).

If you want to test it in VMWare, give Hexxeh a few more days — he’ll no doubt have a prepackaged VM you can play with very soon.

Wouldn’t a Google Chrome OS based notebook come as a refreshing change from the standard Windows 7 Starter Edition? Someone actually thought this and thus, a Google Chrome OS netbook will be introduced later this year. This netbook would be similar to the recently announced N-series netbook N210.

Samsung’s Chrome OS running netbook will have 3G built-in, Wi-Fi, 64GB hard drive (SSD?), and will offer 12-hour of battery life. Speculations suggest that Samsung would be using Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor and it’s also possible that Intel’s new Pine Trail platform would be used.

Last year, Acer claimed that it will be the first PC maker which will come out with Chrome OS based netbook. And now, Samsung has announced these plans. It’s quite possible that both launches would take place simultaneously when Google announces its Chrome OS.

Via, techtree.com