Confirmed — Nvidia Working on Chrome OS Tegra Devices

Earlier this month, rumors out of China indicated that we’d see Google Chrome OS devices running on Nvidia’s Tegra platform. I had a product briefing with Mike Rayfield, Nvidia’s GM of Mobile Business, and heard it directly from the source. When chatting about supported platforms on the Tegra solution, the usual names appeared — Windows Mobile, Windows CE, and Google Android. Oh, and Google Chrome OS too.

Nvidia is “working closely with Google,” on the Chrome OS platform Rayfield tells me. And that stressed to me that Tegra isn’t just a handheld device play. Of course, Rayfield reiterated that point when discussing where Nvidia sees Tegra in the future. It’s a two-pronged approach: Windows Mobile and Google Android support in the smartphone space; Windows CE and Google Chrome OS in the smartbook or netbook space. Linux variants could work as well, but that decision would likely be driven by OEMs desires.

I’ve used netbooks since they were born, so we also chatted about the products of today as compared to what’s coming down the pike. By and large, the netbook space is Intel’s playground right now, but Nvidia sees the devices as “dehydrated laptops.” Consumers still want support for x86 and Windows, but why? It’s all in the application support these days, but with the rise of the web as “the ultimate app store,” Nvidia is poised for the shift.

That led to some shared experiences with my 60-day web challenge from last year. In it, I lived in a web browser on a low-powered UMPC for nearly 99% of my computing time over two months. Indeed, it was a challenge, but the effort — and the proliferation of smartphones — are starting to indicate that people can happily compute in bite-sized chunks: a quick check mail here, a five minute YouTube video there, and so on. If that trend continues, will people need full desktop operating systems and bloated apps on a mobile device?

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