Some thoughts on Google Chrome OS (epecially for photographers)

Google Chrome OS was announced today and everyone is talking about it. Lots of interesting thoughts going down. Here is mine:

I have never been interested in the “netbook” because I’m MacOS-centric and I saw the netbook as a series of compromises from the functionality I want in a laptop that I found unacceptable — AND I believe that 95% of what most users see as the core functionaliry of a netbook, I see as functionalty that belongs on my phone. the netbook is at best a transitional technology, and smartphonees are quickly taking on most of what netbooks are trying to do today. I don’t like the price/performance of a netbook. Hell, I just don’t like the performance very much, not when I can already do most of it on an iPhone or webOS or Android.

As a photographer, I have also never been interested in buying so-called digital wallets such as the Epson P-7000; too expensive for limited functionalty, and to me, it’s more cost effective to just buy enough cards to handle the sitaution and wait until you can get back to the laptop to offload them and make a real backup.

But I take one look at at the Chrome OS type devices and I see something that can be set up as a rather nice digital wallet — PLUS give you access to some key computing capabilities (email, web, wifi, file uploading) and suddenly, for about the cost of what you pay for a decent digital wallet today, you get something that can hopefully act as a wallet AND access to some key computing features as well? Being able to offload pictures and send a few samples online via gmail or upload to smugmug from the field?

NOW you start having something I’d consider having. Neither device alone is worth the cost of buying it to me. But Chrome OS looks like it’ll have the capability to make these two devices one, at about the same price point of either — and now I’m interested. And it’s going to be a while before phones can take on the capacity we’d be looking for to do the digital wallet capabilities, so this is something a good smartphone can’t yet do.

If I’m a product manager for a digital wallet today, I’m looking at the end of life for this type of product and trying to figure out how to move to this new merged capability before someone eats my lunch. If I’m a developer for these new Chrome OS devices, I’m looking to see how to make it act like a digital wallet, because photographers are going to want to buy this.

And if I’m a photographer, I’m watching and hoping this happens, beacuse this has the potential to be a really nice addition to the photo bag that could allow me to stop carrying my laptop in the field but still be able to do a lot of what I currently want while out shooting.

Count me intrigued and hopeful here.

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