Google I/O is all wrapped up and done – the main keynotes with major announcements that is – and we have to say, it was a mind-blowing couple of days and the Mountain View company did not fail to impress us in any way.
Google I/O 2012’s opening keynotes span around a time frame of two days in which major announcements regarding Google’s services and products were made. Yesterday, we saw the second keynote by the search engine giant in which the main highlighting announcements were a native Google Chrome browser for iOS and a native Google Drive app for iOS with offline Docs editing support.
And to our luck, the day 2 video of the keynote is now available to watch which is embedded below at the end of this post.
As you’d expect from any keynote, day 2 of I/O was kicked off by statistics regarding Chrome. Google revealed that Chrome now has over 310 million users, and have labeled it the ‘most popular web browser in the world’.
Considering the popularity and fan-following which Chrome has, Chrome for iPhone and iPad has been anticipated for a very long time now, and it was a no-brainer to believe that it would eventually find its way onto iOS. Though many alternative browsers exist on the App Store, but Chrome is a tried and tested solution on the PC, Mac and Android, making it a little more credible than what others have to offer. Though Chrome on iOS is not as good as it is on Android in terms of speed specifically, but still it’s a gap which was needed to filled.
Google Drive for iPhone and iPad was also announced, and finally brings Google’s cloud-storage service to millions of iOS users around the world. Apart from providing a native Google Drive experience to iOS users, the app also comes with offline editing mode for Docs. Those who don’t know yet, Docs is now a part of Google Drive, and allows users to edit, upload and share their documents on the go.
The forgotten Chromebook also got a little love from Google, and was revealed that Chromebooks will now be available in retail through Best Buy, making it a more readily available cloud-connected companion to own.
Last but not the least, Google also announced their Compute Engine, aimed squarely at Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute and Microsoft’s Azure, it is a service by Google which allows you to run Linux Virtual Machines on the exact same infrastructure which powers the whole of Google. Pretty impressive stuff if you’re a developer.
You can watch the whole day 2 keynote below:
Day 1 of Google I/O 2012 was more focused on mobile software and hardware-based announcements, which included Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the Nexus 7 tablet, Nexus Q media accessory for Android, an update to the Google+ app etc.
You can watch the day 1 keynote by heading over to this link.
You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the web.
