Author: Kevin Tofel

In this week’s mobile device podcast with my co-host Matthew Miller and I shared some early thoughts on the upcoming Acer Chromebook Tab 10.

After some research, I found the WiFi Printer Driver Chrome Web App and since then, I haven’t had a single printer issue. And it doesn’t require you to know the IP address of your local network printer, which saves some configuration time.

It should get easier to add emoji to any text field on a Chromebook or any other computing device that uses the Chrome browser thanks to an experimental option in the Chrome Canary Channel.

Today, Droplets unveiled its newest product, which combines manageable containers and WebAssembly technology to run native desktop apps directly in Chrome and on Chrome OS devices such as Chromebooks. Yes, if you want to run the full version of Microsoft Office on a Chromebook, even when you’re offline, for example, this technology makes it possible.

With the first Chrome tablet arriving later this month, Google is looking to tweak the Chrome OS touch interface to make it more tablet-like. Instead of today’s app launcher experience that shows five recent apps, the launcher will instead show in full screen mode, similar to an Android tablet.

A new Chromebook board dubbed “Atlas” is showing up in the Chromium commit logs with very little information other than a 3840 x 2160 display. That would be the highest resolution yet for a Chromebook.

Here’s a useful website that’s worth bookmarking because it displays the current version of the Dev, Beta and Stable Channels of Chrome OS for all Chromebooks.

The Samsung Chromebook Pro is normally priced at $599 and while you can often find it for less on Amazon, Best Buy is currently discounting the 2-in-1 Chromebook by $100. Even better, this is the model with 64 GB of storage, not the base 32 GB configuration that Samsung sells direct.

Almost every time I tweet about or mention the Pixelbook I purchased a few weeks ago, I inevitably hear that the device costs too much. But Google has always focused Chrome OS and Chromebooks on what it calls the “three S’s” — Simplicity, Speed, and Security — for a range of markets.

Chrome extensions that mine cryptocoins in the background will soon be a thing of the past. Today the Chromium Blog announced that Google will no longer accept new Chrome Web Store extensions that perform this mining. And by the end of June, any existing extensions like these will be de-listed from the Chrome Web Store.

Some students in rural schools have bus commutes of more than an hour and when they get home, they don’t have internet access. Enter Google’s “Rolling Study Halls” program, which provides Wi-Fi and devices on school buses. After a pilot effort, the program today expands to include 16 more school districts.