With the phenomena of netbooks and now more recently tablet computers (not the old school flipscreen Windows tablets, but the iPad and subsequent competing platforms) we find ourselves more and more drawn to smaller devices that can fulfill out daily computing needs.

Nowadays, 90% of what we do is on the internet. Think of a time recently that you used your personal computer otherwise. Not too much there, unless your a gamer. Most of us are avid You-tubers, Facebook fanatics, twitter fiends, or just your basic email users. Of course, you can use your home computer for this, but more and more lately we are being driven towards smaller, more portable devices. Smartphones like the iPhone, Android phones, and soon the Windows 7 Phone. Tablets like the iPad, the new Pre tablet HP is working on, and soon some Windows 7 Tablets. These products are all innovations in their respective fields, and have changed the way we look at computer.

Google, however, is creating a paradigm shift, rather than just an innovation.

Introducing Google Chrome OS, which is rumored to become available this month, is a new netbook / tablet operating system that changes the way that your typical computing is done. Take a look here:

If you have used Google’s Chrome web browser, you should relatively familiar with the look and field of Chrome OS.  This being one of Google’s primary goals, is to make their operating system easy to use and intuitive, like you had used it before.

Start up time is huge, with a total time of under 7 seconds on average, you can be up and running in no time.  Sure beats the minute I have to wait on average to start using my system at home.

The biggest feature is what will be considered the paradigm shift, and that is that items you work on while on your computer, such as documents, spreadsheets, or pictures aren’t actually saved on your computer, they are saved in the Cloud, online, instantly as you work on them, making them available to you at any time you can access a computer.  This benefits us in several ways: first, if your computer is lost or stolen, not only is the data incredibly difficult to hack, but you can be up in moments with a new machine simply by logging in.  Because your information is stored online in the Cloud, it is retrieved with your account, and you are up and running.  Second, this eliminates the need of massive amounts of storage on your computer, which allows us to do away with the old mechanical hard drives which have a high failure rate in laptops and netbooks and move into the newer, solid state technology, which is faster and has no moving parts.

If you find yourself a little more interested in this technology, go on You Tube and search Google Chrome OS.  There are some great technical demos that will show you what you can do with these devices.