Every day Authority: 💻 Time to reevaluate Chrome OS

🎁 Blissful Friday, everybody! Christmas is simply over every week away (for those who rejoice), and we nonetheless solely have two presents underneath the tree. Time to get wrapping!

Chrome OS has been round in some type or one other for greater than a decade now, however for those who aren’t a pupil it’s fully attainable that it’s fallen off of your radar. Nonetheless, a current put up by my colleague Rita El Khoury highlights why 2022 was the 12 months she fell again in love together with her Pixelbook and Chrome OS, and he or she makes a convincing argument to revisit the platform.

• I extremely advocate you read the whole piece, however right here’s a bit tl;dr.
• Rita first began utilizing Chromebooks in 2015, and finally picked up a reduced Google Pixelbook in 2017.
• (Sidenote, I’m massively dissatisfied that the Pixelbook team was disbanded this year. However that’s neither right here nor there.)
• 5 years later, it’s nonetheless her solely laptop computer, however she discovered herself utilizing it much less and fewer.
• This 12 months, she realized her laptop computer wasn’t updating for no matter motive, and as soon as fastened, she acquired a flood of recent options.
• For her, it was like a brand new laptop computer. Chrome OS has change into far more highly effective than she realized, and now she’s again on the Chrome OS hype prepare.

So what are these new options? Right here’s a fast rundown:

• Chrome OS and Android telephones at the moment are tightly built-in, with the Cellphone Hub function exhibiting current photos, cell Chrome tabs, and extra in your Chromebook display screen. You may even use it to shortly arrange a hotspot with out touching your cellphone.
• Productiveness instruments like a built-in PDF editor and enhanced display screen captures (together with video and audio recordings) are additionally useful options for those who use your Chromebook for work.
• As a result of rise of Chromebook tablets, Chrome OS has change into way more finger-friendly. Thumbnails and toggles are a lot bigger, and gestures provide fast shortcuts.
• Likewise for stylus help. Preloaded apps like Canvas and Cursive let you draw, take notes, and extra utilizing any supported stylus.
• There’s additionally a clipboard supervisor that remembers the final 5 objects you copied for simple pasting. I want this function have been baked into Home windows and macOS too!
• A brand new darkish mode, better Android app support, and the power to install Linux or Steam games are a couple of different new options price mentioning.

Able to revisit Chrome OS? Take a look at our picks for the best Chromebooks and Chromebook tablets, in addition to our extensive guide to Chromebooks and their capabilities.

📺 On the lookout for one thing to look at this weekend? Listed below are the best new streaming movies price testing (Android Authority).

For comparability, try the original theatrical trailer here. Not even narration by Harrison Ford himself can save this from hardcore 70s cheese, and the inclusion of a deleted brother-sister kiss on the point out of “romance” is especially eyebrow-raising.

Might the drive be with you,