Chrome OS will remain notebook exclusive, standalone version will not be made available

If you’ve been having dreams about purchasing a Chrome OS smartphone or tablet down the line, then you’re likely out of luck. In addition to announcing that the cloud-based OS will not be available as an installable version, Google also made it clear that the OS is being designed only for notebooks.

At the final day of the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, the company made it clear that they are only targeting laptops with their browser OS. According to Endgadget, Google’s Senior Chrome VP had the following to say on the subject:

“[Chrome OS] is a new experience we're working on. It's hardware agnostic in a sense. We are fully, 100 percent focused on laptops. Most of the web usage -- greater than 90 percent -- is on laptops. That's what we're working on today, and we have no other plans on any other form factors.”

We definitely would have loved to play around with a Chrome OS powered tablet, but it wasn’t likely that Google would try and snatch sales away from their highly successful Android OS.

Furthermore, Google is sticking to their plans of Chrome OS combining a software and hardware experience and won’t be making any installable versions of the OS available. As reported by Liliputing, Google representatives have gone on the record and stated that they will not be releasing any official standalone versions of Chrome OS. With Google focusing on integrating the OS in approved hardware only, this move was definitely nothing unexpected.

On the other hand, Google does routinely make the OS source code available and that doesn’t look like it's changing anytime soon. And while there won’t be any Google backed standalone copies of Chrome OS available, there are no shortage of developers willing to compile the available code into installable Chromium builds. 

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