Google Tablet

It appears that Google is considering developing its own tablet device. A new post on the Chromium web site (the open source project behind Chrome and ChromeOS) shows "visual explorations of how a Chrome OS tablet UI might look in hardware." Among the explored possibilities are:

• Keyboard interaction with the screen: anchored, split, attached to focus
• Launchers as an overlay, providing touch or search as means to access web sites
• Contextual actions triggered via dwell
• Zooming UI for multiple tabs
• Tabs presented along the side of the screen (see Side tabs)
• Creating multiple browsers on screen using a launcher

A short video illustrates some of the concepts being explored:

Chromium is not officially part of Google but the mockups appear to come from Glen Murphy, Google Chrome's designer, suggesting that at the very least, Google is toying with the idea of a tablet device for its Chrome OS.

Unlike Apple, Google is likely to work with multiple partners (think Google Android). As a result, we could see a number of different interpretations with different screen sizes and possibly customized user interfaces.