Chromebooks: coming to more stores near you

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

In Northern California where I live, summer is here, which means family vacations, kids’ camps, BBQs and hopefully some relaxation. But it also means back-to-school shopping is just around the corner. So in case you’re on the hunt for a laptop in addition to pens, paper, and stylish new outfits, your search just got a whole lot easier. Chromebooks—a fast, simple, secure laptop that won't break the bank—will now be carried in over 3 times more stores than before, or more than 6,600 stores around the world.

In addition to Best Buy and Amazon.com, we’re excited to welcome several new retailers to the family. Starting today, Walmart will be making the newest Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive (SSD), available in approximately 2,800 stores across the U.S., for just $199. Look for Chromebooks coming to the laptop sections of a Walmart near you this summer.

And beginning this weekend, Staples will bring a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung to every store in the U.S.—more than 1,500 in total. You can also purchase via Staples online, while businesses can purchase through the Staples Advantage B2B program. In the coming months select Office Depot, OfficeMax, and regional chains Fry’s and TigerDirect locations will begin selling Chromebooks.

In the 10 other markets worldwide where Chromebooks are sold, availability in national retailers continues to expand. In addition to Dixons in the UK, now 116 Tesco stores are selling Chromebooks, as well as all Media Markt and Saturn stores in the Netherlands, FNAC stores in France and Elgiganten stores in Sweden. In Australia, all JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores will be carrying Chromebooks for their customers as well. With our partners, we’re working hard to bring Chromebooks to even more countries later this year.

Chromebooks make great computers for everyone in the family—and now you shouldn’t have to look very far to find one. Happy summer!

Posted by David Shapiro, Director of Chromebook Marketing, long-time reader, first-time poster

Play Cube Slam face-to-face against your friends

My friends and I used to play video games all the time, squashed together on the couch, engaged in structured intellectual discourse about exactly how badly we were going to destroy each other. Now that we live spread out around the world, it’s a bit harder to dance in each other’s faces and yell “booyah!” every time we win a game. Enter: Cube Slam.

Cube Slam is a video game that you can play face-to-face against your friends. It’s a Chrome Experiment built using WebRTC, an open web technology that lets you video chat right in the browser without installing any plug-ins. That means you can quickly and easily play Cube Slam with your friends, no matter where they are in the world, just by sharing a link.

To win Cube Slam, hit the cube against your friend’s screen three times until the screen explodes. Shields, obstacles, and gravity fields change with every new level, and you can unlock power-ups including fireballs, lasers, multi-balls, mirrored controls, bulletproof shields, fog, ghost balls, time bombs, resized paddles, extra lives, and death balls––though you might want to avoid the death balls. If none of your friends are online, you can always play against Bob the Bear and see what level you can reach. If you install the Cube Slam app, you can even play Bob when you’re offline.

Cube Slam’s graphics are rendered in WebGL and CSS 3D, and its custom soundtrack is delivered dynamically through Web Audio. WebRTC, which enables the two-person game, is available on desktop Chrome and Chrome OS, and will be available on mobile later this year. In the meantime, you can play Cube Slam against Bob the Bear on your phone or tablet. To learn more about what’s going on under the hood, see our technology page and Chromium blog post.

Play a friend. Play a bear. Have fun!

Posted by Clem Wright, Google Creative Lab, Ursine Diversion Division

Roll across platforms and race across screens with two new Chrome Experiments

We spend huge chunks of our lives on our phones and tablets. And since life shouldn't be all work and no play, we've created two new Chrome Experiments—Roll It and Racer—that let you play with other people using phones, tablets, and computers running Chrome.

Roll It brings a classic boardwalk game to your browser using your phone and a desktop or laptop computer. Chrome on the phone lets you aim and roll the ball with a flick of your wrist, while Chrome on the computer renders the 3D graphics of the Roll It alley.

With Racer, you can build slot-car-style race tracks which align across up to five mobile screens. Touch your screen, and your car speeds across all the phones and tablets, not just your own. This shows a hint of what’s possible when web experiences are designed for a multi-player (and multi-device) world.

Both experiments use the latest in web technologies and keep themselves synchronized using WebSockets, which allows data to be sent between multiple devices and servers at any time. Developers interested in learning more should stay tuned to the Chromium blog for documentation on how we made both games.

Have fun, and experiment on!

Posted by Iain Tait, Creative Director and Speed Demon

Browse the web across languages, on the go

Today’s Chrome Beta for Android release brings the built-in translation bar you’ve seen on desktop Chrome to help you read more of the web while you’re on the go, regardless of the language of the web page. When you come across a page written in a language that isn't in the same language as your phone or tablet, look for the translation bar. To translate the page, touch the “Translate” button.

Following fullscreen support on phones, we are now adding fullscreen on tablets as well. As you scroll, the top toolbar disappears so you can immerse yourself in the web page content. Finally, on phones, a “+” in the toolbar now makes creating tabs even easier.

For those of you trying out our experimental data compression feature, you can see a graph (under “Settings > Bandwidth Management”) that shows your estimated bandwidth savings.

The latest version of Chrome Beta for Android is available on Google Play. We look forward to your early feedback.

Posted by Miguel Garcia, Software Engineer & Multilingual Maestro

Richer notifications coming to Chrome

When you’re surfing the web, you can get so immersed that you might not realize you’re late for a meeting or that someone messaged you in another chat window. A couple years ago, we created a way for notifications to appear outside the browser window. Starting in today’s Beta channel release, we’re enabling Chrome apps and extensions to show richer notifications with a revamped user interface (as well as under the hood -- developers can learn more on the Chromium blog).

We’ve designed these notifications to be beautiful, useful and engaging. They can display formatted text and images, and can include actions directly inside the pop-up (so you can respond to that email right away).

Missed a bunch of notifications while you were taking a coffee break? No problem -- you can open up the notification center to see them all in one place.

Notification Center on Windows

Notification Center on ChromeOS

You can also disable notifications from any source whenever you wish, for those times when you want some peace and quiet.

Download Chrome Beta today to get a preview of these features on Windows (Mac support coming soon!).

Posted by Somas Thyagaraja, Product Manager and Nifty Notifier

Searching on the go, made even simpler

Chrome for Android, improved search and fullscreen browsing

Today’s Chrome for Android stable update, now available on Google Play, makes searching on the go even simpler. You can now see your search queries in the omnibox instead of the long search URL, so you can easily refine them and view more results.

To make browsing the mobile web even easier, web pages also display in fullscreen on phones. As you scroll, the top toolbar disappears so you can immerse yourself in the web page content. When you scroll up, the toolbar returns so you can get on to the next thing.

Chrome for iPhone and iPad, with voice search (coming soon)

Over the coming days, we’re rolling out an update for iPhone and iPad as well. You can now speak your searches into the omnibox. Touch the microphone, say your search query aloud and see your results (in some cases spoken back to you), all without typing a single letter. Try these queries with the update (coming soon to the App Store):

• “How many miles from San Antonio to Dallas?”
• “What’s the weather in Rome?”
• “Who stars in The Internship?”

This update also enables faster reloading of web pages by using the cache more efficiently when the network is slow, which is especially useful when you’re on the go. Finally, other iOS apps can now give you the option to open links in Chrome and then return to the app with just one tap.

We look forward to your feedback on the latest versions of Chrome for Android and iOS.

Posted by Yusuf Ozuysal and Milan Broum, Minimalist & Vocal Software Engineers

Every second counts

Last month’s Chrome Beta release contained optimizations so that web pages load 5% faster on average. We’ve included those optimizations in today’s Chrome Stable release so all users will enjoy a faster browsing experience.

A 5% improvement may not seem like much by itself, but our estimates show that when you add up those saved seconds across all Chrome users, it totals to more than 510 years of people’s time saved every week.

Want to make that number even bigger? Download Chrome today.

Posted by James Simonsen, Software Engineer and Saver of Split Seconds