Google Archive

It's a bit of a mobile day on OSNews today, with news about Cinder and Symbian. Next up is Google's Android. While Android is designed for smartphones, there has been increasing chatter about netbook manufacturers using Android on netbooks. Google has always remained fairly mum on the possibility of Android on netbooks, but during yesterday's earnings call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about this subject.

At OSNews, we've talked about the possibility of Google's Android operating system moving to netbooks quite a few times already. It seems to make sense; it's designed for small displays, is probably light on resources, it's Free and open, and has the backing of a heavyweight company. Lately, the first actual signs of Android moving to netbooks have appeared.

Rumour after rumour and story after story talk of Google wanting a piece of the netbook pie, the only pie in the computer hardware business that still tastes any good. They are supposed to bring Android, the phone operating system based on Linux and a modified version of Java, to netbooks in order to compete with Windows. Analysts are torn about whether or not Android would have a chance.

The Google Chrome team has pushed out the beta release of the Chrome 2.0 web browser release. In addition, they have also opened the beta update channel, so if you're running the beta you'll get continuous updates keeping you up to speed with Chrome 2.0's development tree. Apart from speed improvements, Chrome 2.0 delivers several other interesting new features.

Developers willing to dish out the $400 required for an unlocked Dev Phone 1 won't be happy to find that access to paid market applications has been disabled by Google. It was possibly done to sloppily patch up a loophole that supposedly gave users of the unlocked phone the ability to download all applications for free. What little information Google would give as to why they made this decision included, "These phones give developers of handset software full permissions to all aspects of the device... We aren't distributing copy protected applications to these phones in order to minimize unauthorized copy of the applications." What makes this more interesting is that, at least according to Engadget, an unlocked original G1 doesn't have this limitation. It's rather ironic that a developer using said phone won't be able to access his or her own paid app. Let's hope Google remedies this quickly as you never know when an angry mob of app-deprived developers will storm the Googleplex with torches and sporks.

Earlier this morning, you may have been surprised to see that every Google search you performed resulted in links to sites which were, according to Google, potentially harmful to your computer. As it turns out, Google's malware detection system got a little trigger-happy - due to a human error.