Users of Chromebooks have it easy. All of their data, backed up automatically to Google Drive, they don’t have a care in the world. Except when it comes to the Downloads folder. On a Google Chromebook, the Downloads folder is local to the device and is not backed up anywhere. This might not be a problem in…
Get ready for Chrome OS to get a lot more pervasive and a lot more interesting this year, if only because it’s going to show up in new kinds of hardware. Google has been talking up the latest round of Chromebooks — the Samsung Chromebook Pro from CES and today’s new education-focused Chromebooks — but…
Less than a year ago, Google announced that the Play Store and Android apps would be supported on Chromebooks. Now the company has made this feature a guarantee on all new devices. According to the list of Android-compatible Chromebooks, all new Chromebooks that come out in 2017 and later will support Android apps. Source: All Chromebooks debuting in…
Google’s new app, available in the Chrome Web Store, lets you easily access files on a network server from within Chrome OS. Source: Chromebooks can now seamlessly access Windows network file shares | PCWorld Although the article focusses on Windows file sharing, macOS computer can use the same networking protocol, SMB. This means that the…
Liliputing is reporting that several more models of Chromebooks now support Android. These Chromebooks are the Acer Chromebook 14, Acer Chromebook 15, Samsung Chromebook 3, and Toshiba Chromebook 2 (2015). The downside is that while the first three models (the Asus Flip, Acer R11, and Pixel 2) can now run Android running the stable version of…
For years, the knock on Chrome OS was that it was “just a browser.” A PC, people thought, had to be more than that. But now, almost six years since that first Chromebook, just a browser has turned out to be just enough for a growing group of users. Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first…
In my initial post about Android on the Asus Flip Chromebook, I wrote how it was pretty easy to get the Amazon App store up and running. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. At the time, my Chromebook was in Developer Mode. This mode is different from the Developer Channel for ChromeOS. Developer Mode removes a…
Today I put my Asus Flip into Developer Mode so I could run full Linux apps alongside ChromeOS. This is good if you want to play, but I’d be hard pressed to recommend this configuration for schools. Once the device is in Developer Mode all of the protections offered by ChromeOS are gone, including the…
Google announced at its I/O 2016 Developer Conference that Chromebooks will soon be able to run Android apps, opening up a library of 1.5 million apps for use on the Google Chromebooks. The implications are pretty big for education, and it’s happening this year. The numbers Chromebooks now make up over half of the devices…