The Chrome Cast

This week on The Chrome Cast, we were honestly all over the place. This week’s news cycle was a veritable mixed bag, but we tried to stick to the most relevant bits and pieces. Probably top of everyone’s mind is the impending back to school season we’re about to enter. With the pandemic looming, this will be a return to education unlike any we’ve seen before. With some tips on Chromebook buying and a Lenovo Chromebook Duet to give away, we’re hoping to help in that transition a bit.

After that, though, the discussion goes in a ton of directions as we talk about Google’s long-anticipated official announcement of the Pixel 4a reveal date (August 3rd), a bit about the upcoming Phone Hub feature for Chromebooks that will further unite Chrome OS and Android, and the current state of USI pens that are just now showing signs of real market arrival. It’s a packed show, for sure, so we hope you enjoy this week’s episode.

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This week on The Chrome Cast, we’re talking through all the goodies that came along with the surprisingly-full Chrome OS 84 update. Right on schedule and overflowing with new features, Chrome OS 84 feels like the most well-thought-out update in a long time from the Chrome OS team and has us very excited for what is changing in the OS and all the things we think are on the way.

Speaking of those new features on the way, we spend a lot of time discussing screens in this podcast as well. From Samsung’s QLED screens coming to a Chromebook in the near future to HDR content handling for current and upcoming Chrome OS hardware, there’s a ton to be excited about with Chromebooks down the line. Add to that the development of dual-screened Chromebooks in the testing phase and you have a podcast that is packed to the gills with new software and hardware updates across the board.

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This week on The Chrome Cast, our conversation is a tad more focused than usual, and the central focus is Google hardware. No, we aren’t talking about the upcoming Pixel 4a, 4a 5G or 5.  Instead, we're focusing on why the current crop of Pixel phones is such a mess and why we don’t think there’s any Google-made flagship Chromebooks on the horizon.

With a move to make and utilize their own custom processors likely happening, Google’s shifts could be occurring just under the surface and we’d likely not see the fruits of that labor until sometime in 2021 at best. While we don’t know exactly how all this will look, it is fun to put the pieces together and speculate a bit about what Google may have up their sleeves from a hardware perspective in both the Android and Chrome OS spaces.

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This week, we had the opportunity to do something very special during our podcast. We were able to get an exclusive interview with John Maletis – Chrome OS Head of Product Management, Engineering & UX. As you can tell from his title, John heads up much of the engineering and user experience parts of the general Chromebook experience.

We got to enjoy a 5-question interview with John, asking him about the current state of Chrome OS development, the trajectory moving forward, and how Chrome OS has grown and helped millions of users amidst the ever-changing landscape of our current pandemic. We loved getting to chat with John and feel his insights were very interesting not only for us, but hopefully for you as well. Enjoy this very special episode of The Chrome Cast and make sure you are subscribed: there’s definitely more of this coming!

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This week we’ve tried out a Q&A format where we let the questions guide our discussion. From additional colors for the Pixel Buds to odd, questionable decisions Google is making in the phone space, we spend quite a bit of time talking about all the ways Google is fumbling through hardware right now. The Pixel line of phones is on life support and now the Pixel 3a has been discontinued without a public roadmap to explain what the next move will be with both the Pixel 4a and the rumored Pixel 5.

After getting past some of those frustrations, we get to our ‘Best of 2020’ video/post/landing page and talk through some of the fantastic shifts we’re seeing in Chromebook hardware right now towards the mid-range. Additionally we get into ARM-powered Chromebook tablets and how they work with Android apps better than other tablets with Intel chips inside. It’s all based on listener questions, and we loved using this format this week to discuss. Enjoy!

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This week on The Chrome Cast, we kept things relatively tight from a discussion perspective. The show really stays in two main sections: Google’s upcoming hardware releases and Acer’s excellent new Chromebook Spin 713. First up, for Google’s hardware, we get into some of the upcoming features like group calls on the Nest Home Max, FCC approvals of the Pixel 4a, Google’s hard-to-discern hardware release plans, and why the cancellation of Google I/O seems to have disrupted more than just the event itself.

For the second half of the show, we spend a lot of time talking about the fantastic Acer Chromebook Spin 713. With a high-end build, top-notch internals, and a very excellent user experience, this Chromebook is hitting all the right notes and sits at a far more reasonable asking price when compared to comparable Chromebooks released this year. This device is one to watch for sure.

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This week on The Chrome Cast, our discussion is mainly dominated with the news of Windows applications finally becoming available on Chrome OS via a partnership with Parallels. This move, aimed squarely at the enterprise sector of Chrome OS for the time being, is sending pretty big ripples through the Chromebook ecosystem. While we think it is a big step and an important move for Chrome OS, it still is best to see the arrival of Windows apps in Chrome OS as a stop gap or bridge as we continually move towards a more modern, web-based reality.

We also spend some time talking through the upcoming addition of the updated, locally-stored Google Assistant for Chromebooks and the rumored/leaked new Google Home that we now expect to see in the near future.

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As always, this week’s episode of The Chrome Cast is simply jam-packed with fun stuff. It has been a busy week around the Chrome Unboxed office, but a few stories were worth some more in-depth discussion. First up, we talk about a couple upcoming Chromebooks: one that was falsely rumored and one that is highly-speculative at this point. With the Pixelbook 2, there’s simply no facts behind the rumors and we go into depth on why this keeps happening with Google-made Chromebooks. The other device – a possible XPS Chromebook from Dell – is being speculated with much more factual basis, but still positioned alongside some heavy guess work and assumption.

From there, we talk a good bit about how good affordable Chromebooks are getting now that Intel’s mobile chipsets are actually quite decent performers in Chromebooks. With more of these Gemini Lake devices hitting the market, the lower-end of the Chrome OS spectrum is becoming a very interesting place, indeed.

Finally, we chat through the highly-rumored new Chromecast we expect Google to launch soon. What will it be called? How much will it cost? How will Google market it to users? These are all the things we weigh in on during our time on the show this week, so come along for a fun ride this week on The Chrome Cast.

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This week on The Chrome Cast, we spend a bit of time talking through the current streak Lenovo is on, delivering great device after great device all at prices that are lower than expected. With the Flex 5, Duet, and the Chromebook 3, Lenovo seems to be making the clear decision to offer better hardware at lower price points than other manufacturers have managed prior. If it seem like our site has been covered in Lenovo Chromebook coverage, that’s for good reason: Lenovo is simply crushing it right now.

We also spend some time talking about gaming in a few different forms. For one, the release of Doom and Doom II for free to Chromebook users is a big deal because these are two examples of Android apps working on Chromebooks in the way you would expect. Android games on Chromebooks have been notoriously bad, so seeing Doom and Doom II work just as you’d expect on a Chromebook is an encouraging change. On the Stadia front, we cover the new games available to Pro subscribers for June and there are some great ones including SUPER HOT, our current favorite.

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This week on The Chrome Cast we have so much to talk about that we actually had to bump a few things over to next week’s episode. We’ll obviously be discussing those things and more next week, but for this week we talked about the impact Krita could have on desktop-class applications on Chrome OS moving forward. With the beta arrival of the popular painting application making its way from Windows, MacOS, and Linux over to Chrome OS via Android, there’s room to dream about more productivity apps taking the same route to Chrome OS in the near future.

We also spend some time talking through the new Chrome OS devices we see on the horizon, and there are tons of them. We’ve put up a post we’ll keep updated over time that holds all the boards and devices we’re tracking along the way. At this time last year, we began tracking both ‘Hatch’ and ‘Kukui’ that have brought us most of the new, interesting devices in the early parts of 2020. We’d expect that to continue into 2021 in much the same way, only with more devices this time around based on some different boards.

Additionally, we are talking through all the great updates that showed up this week in Chrome OS 83. There are tons of nuggets in this update, so we’ll surely be posting more in-depth looks at some of them over the next couple weeks.

Lastly, we spend some time talking about Gaming Unboxed, a new site that we’ve launched that focuses primarily on the mobile gaming experience. With more and more gamers utilizing phones, tablets, and streaming services like Stadia, this is a category we felt deserved its own space. So, if you haven’t already, head over to Gaming Unboxed and check it out.

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