Lookout iPad. Here comes Google's tablet

Google shows off design concepts of its own Chrome OS running on a tablet

Last week, the tech world was presented with Apple's iPad, a touch screen computer said to put the netbook in its grave and change the way we read books, consume news, play games, browse the Web and more.  The closest competitor to the iPad so far has been Amazon's Kindle, which even Apple's CEO Steve Jobs admitted, "Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this, we're going to stand on their shoulders for this."  

But amid the stir up from good to bad of everything iPad, has risen another competitor - Google.  The Internet giant has shown off design concepts of how a Chrome OS tablet UI may look like in hardware.

Unlike Apple, Google isn't working on actually building it's own Tablet hardware.  Instead, the company is releasing design concepts of how its operating system could function on one of the third party developers that decide to use Chrome OS as their operating system for a tablet.  HTC, the manufacturers of the Nexus One Android phone, is rumored to be working with Google to release the first tablet running Chrome OS.  

Some of the design concepts Google showed off include:
    * Keyboard interaction with the screen: anchored, split, attached to focus.
    * Launchers as an overlay, providing touch or search as means to access web sites.
    * Contextual actions triggered via dwell.
    * Zooming UI for multiple tabs
    * Tabs presented along the side of the screen (see Side tabs)
    * Creating multiple browsers on screen using a launcher

One thing to keep in mind, these are simply mockup designs.  They aren't exactly how the final product will end up looking.  At the same time, it proves there are and will be plenty of other options in the future.  Although Apple's tablet proved to look and function great, with a decent price point, the iPad still has many limitations: like not being able to run Flash, and not even able to run multiple applications at once.  On the other hand, Google's new products will embrace the open Internet and hope to run applications within the browser, while Apple continues to limit itself by having developers build applications optimized for its device only.