Technology. Without Error

The best way to try out a new OS would be to run it off a USB drive. Now you can run the early build of the Chromium OS off a USB. Just grab the Chromium OS build from here and follow instructions. If you’d rather not go to all that trouble, you can try running Chrome OS off a virtual machine like I did.

The folks at engadget have even put up a video as to how it works.

The secret behind the builds is all about creating a build. If you’d rather create the build yourself then go to Google’s build instructions page for the Chromium OS.

Running Google Chrome off the USB makes it run faster, lets you have a real feel of the OS. All you need is a bit of time and patience.

It was this review for the opera 10 browser that made me think about it. Thanks to the proliferation of apis, desktop and mobile applications which have made my devices completely internet enabled devices, I now wonder what I would the browser for.

1. I check my email. But I can check that using IMAP on my mobile phone or via Thunderbird on my desktop.
2. Facebook. I get an email notification, that’s when I need to check the facebook page. I have the facebook app on my mobile, which does quite a decent job, and even Gravity supports fb. I don’t use seesmic, so on my laptop, I need to use the browser.
3. News that which twitter hasn’t delivered, I need a browser for. Of course I could use RSS feeds, but I find that most of the RSS feeds for newspapers pretty much crowd up my reader with several items which will remain unread forever. So I do need a browser, or I could just read the newspaper!
4. Twitter. Gravity on my phone and Destroy twitter on my laptop.
5. Reference. Most of my reference is when I don’t exactly have access to a laptop or don’t have time to get to it. Which means, my mobile search tool is what I use for reference. It still uses the default browser on my mobile though.
6. Google reader. Gravity does a decent job, but I still would like to see images and links on my mobile phone. Now this is something I definitely need a browser for.
7. Blogging. Thanks to posterous, all I now need to do is to send an email and I have a blog post.

My laptop is all about the browser. In fact, the browser is on the startup application list. So if I don’t need the browser, I don’t need the laptop?

After writing this post I realized that Gravity for S60 is becoming a really important application in my mobile arsenal.

I have tried to take an extreme view of certain sites in here. You must’ve noticed that I still need a browser for many tasks, but the point is that I’m soon beginning to see myself using my mobile more than my laptop, and my applications more than the browser.  Now if only my mobile phone had more screen real estate and a bigger keyboard.