It appears that an event in California hosted by Google tomorrow will see the 1st demonstration of their much hyped operating system Google Chrome OS.

According to reports the technology giant will not only be giving a demonstration of the OS but also a “complete overview” of the product. Reports do not seem to confirm the earlier story we saw of a public launch this week but they do show that at least a fair amount of progress has already been made.

The event will include talks by Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS and thankfully a “question and answer” session which should hopefully mean we have a lot more information about the OS.

It will also be interesting to see what notebook or laptop is used during the demonstrations, hopefully we’ll get an insight into what hardware support will be like or at least who has been making headway into support the new operating system.

Well that’s what TechCrunch are saying in a post that went up this morning. They say that information from a reliable source says that Google’s Chrome OS “will become available to download within a week”.

This is indeed exciting news and as we have previously mentioned we expected to see a developer version late this year… but is this really going to be it? If so then we can only assume that hardware support may be a little thin on the ground to begin with but regardless I’m looking forward to trying this out on my Eee 901.

Google have slashed the price of online storage space to just $5 per year for 20 gig of space and you can have 1TB for just $256/year… quite staggering prices we feel.

The announcement was made via the Google Photo blog yesterday evening and claims double the storage for a quarter of the price. Google cited Moore’s Law for the drop in storage costs and said that this along with improvements made by them allowed them to lower the cost to us, the end customers.

The online storage is currently only available to use with Picasa and Google Mail but could this be just the start? Our feelings are that this is the start of moves to allow more and more customer data in the cloud and should allow the cost of hardware running the Google Chrome OS to be cheaper due to the reduced local storage (though with Moore’s law perhaps the price reduction won’t have such a large impact).

According to Xconomy – a US based technology news/information supplier – and based on an “on-the-record” roundtable discussion with Google CEO Eric Schmidt there will be public release of Chrome OS before the end of 2009.

In a piece on the discussions here we can pull the following nugget;

The first public version of Chrome OS will be coming out by the end of 2009, Schmidt said. But the operating system won’t be a serious competitor for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or other operating systems untilmanufacturers build cost-competitive machines that run Chrome OS and developers write applications that run on it.

Now maybe I’m just reading that wrong but to me it seems like he’s not talking about a developer release here. What do you guys make of it?

The Asus Smartbook (we’re not sure of it’s real name just yet, perhaps a sibling to the Eee) which will be ARM powered with a Snapdragon chipset and was due to be launched Q1 2010 has had it’s launch date slip to Q2.

Our initial thoughts were that this could be so that the little piece of kit could be released with the Google Chrome OS on it as the operating system of choice. According to Judy Wu – one of Asus’ market specialists and an interview with the RegHardware, this delay was not to do with the OS of choice and in fact hinted that accommodating Chrome as the OS may even have more detrimental affects on the date that the Smartbook could be released to the wild.

Early demonstrations of the Smartbook have shown it running the Google Android operating system as used in the T-Mobile G1/G2.

Another fake Google Chrome OS trended today on twitter and got everyone very excited.

Chrome OS topic trending on twitter

The ChromeOSLinux site had actually been up for some time (hosted on Google Sites of all places) and was essentially a linux build that included the Chrome browser and a few other apps. The site has since been removed… I can only imagine by Google.

If you looked carefully (well not that much care was really needed) you could see that a group called SUSE Studio claimed to be behind it. It could be these guys perhaps… seems to make sense as they create custom linux builds. I’d think that they have got plenty of good PR from this

One of the screenshots certainly seemed to give some people the wrong idea.

SUSE Studio's Screenshot

Uncomfirmed rumours have it that the launch of Google Chrome OS (Google’s much hyped operating system) will be handled by Omnicom’s award winning OMD.

It is widely thought that plans for the operating system known as Chrome OS will be presented at some point before December.

Well you can’t quite have it… but what you can get is a copy of is what seems to be the Chrome Browser for Chrome OS.

Thanks to a TechCrunch reader who read their post on the 12th October about the appearance of a chromium-rel–linux-chromeos folder on the Chrome snapshot site and then proceeded to download it and host it you can now get a copy too.

Of course if you’re just curious as to the current state of play then check out his blog.

Originally we had been told that we wouldn’t see Google Chrome in the wild until some point in 2010 with developers able to get their hands on some earlier versions possibly in late 2009. These times have all slipped forward though according to Shanzai.com.

If Shanzai and their Chinese sources are to be believed then it seems that notebook manufacturer Lemote could be shipping devices running the developer version of Google’s OS as early as next month.

This of course could be a risky strategy… though Google certainly do not seem adverse to sticking things out in Beta.