Chrome: Putting the shine into mobile computing?

Google's Chrome has been keeping the bloggers very busy lately, and I was more than happy to leave them all to it until I could think of something that Chrome did that was relevant to Oxford Archaeology. Twm Davies' latest analysis on El Reg beat me to it (you might also be interested in Twm's blog).

Google is an advertising company; they make their money by giving you various free online tools that contain targeted advertising. Google aim to make better tools than anyone else, by doing so you'll end up using their software and being subjected to their targeted advertising. Things like word processors pose a problem for Google; they'd like you to be using theirs and looking at their ads, but the current browser world wasn't up to the task and Google's services were appearing to suffer as a result. The answer was simple; release the now famous Chrome browser. You'll have already read about this elsewhere.

Oxford Archaeology isn't an advertising company, but the vast majority of our applications are web based. The solutions we produce will often come with a web front end, as will most third party software we use on a daily basis; email's the big one for staff, but there's countless web interfaces I use daily for things such as the firewalls, PBXs, email admin, server admin, desktop admin, monitoring, helpdesks... A lot of these are big, java filled web 2.0, beasts, and a browser that doesn't completely fall apart when one tab has issues would be an amazing thing to behold.

My job isn't just about clicking things in FireFox, however; we're working on mobile computing infrastructures to be used within Oxford Archaeology and elsewhere. "Android" is what almost anyone will say to me just after I've told them that we want to develop mobile tools on mobile phones. Of course, Google is just an Ad company; I'm not convinced that Android will be open enough to allow for really interesting local applications. It seems more likely to me that Google will use Android to fragment the mobile market to the point at which developing locally installed applications becomes unprofitable, which will be fine because Google's web apps will pick up the pieces. Which is where Chrome comes in.

Chrome has two features highlighted by Davies that many others seem to be overlooking; Google Gears and containers. Containers are something I've considered before as potentially useful as Oxford Archaeology move to a increasingly web based means of application deployment. Google Gears allows these web applications to work when you're disconnected. We could provide a container for our web based email, for example, that would work when you were on a plane; with four offices spread over two countries, such an improvement to email would likely be appreciated by group management.

Unfortunately, laptops on planes aren't really mobile enough for me. The release of the Linux source code for Chrome will allow us to run it on the Openmoko devices, which should by now have an obvious appeal; Chrome on the Openmoko allows for the web applications currently deployed in the office to be deployed in the field. More importantly, it would allow for the development of new applications in rapid time and in the style we're accustomed to. Mobile data entry is the obvious example of this web API.

Davies suggests that Nokia's new services based business model will be in direct competition with a Chrome Mobile. This would likely be a competition that Nokia couldn't win. Google will give a single sign-in service that provides a wide range of applications and works at your PC or on your mobile; bad news for Nokia and likely a strategy that takes aim squarely at office suites installed on your computer. The technology that underlies this, however, would be very good for Oxford Archaeology and anyone else rethinking mobile computing.

Chrome's new and shiny (pun intended); let's not worry for now about the occasional sites that don't work with it. It's a beta, which is a shame because "beta" has almost become a piece of Google branding, but the important thing is that at this stage we should be thinking bigger; mobile phones, ubiquitous computing and a "who cares?" attitude to the old problem of not having a signal.