I’m pretty sure 95% of pants in the world can fit a passport in the normal pocket, thus can fit a 5″ Tablet in there.

My going-into-town pant’s cell phone pocket can actually fit the 5″ Dell Streak, although 2cm of it will be exposed. My other two pants could probably do 3.7-4″ screens at the max, so hopefully pants makers will make it possible for 5″ devices to take off. I don’t think most people would want to carry that device in there regular pockets.

That is when Google steps in and becomes a wireless internet service provider. How would they do it?

1. Google can buy wireless bandwidth from at least one carrier in every country. Then resell or even give that away to users of the Global Google SIM Card system. Basically, by logic of free market competition, there should always be one carrier in every country who would be interested in selling Terrabytes of Wireless bandwidth to Google in huge bulk order, which they can use however they want, for example to give us free wireless bandwidth for Google Voice SIP calls, those calls require very little bandwidth depending on voice codec used.

2. In some countries, Google might find it hard to purchase bulk wireless bandwidth from any of the carriers in that country. When that happens, public pressure and political pressure should be used at full scale, this will force politicians to regulate the reselling of wireless data at regulated prices. Just as many countries have rules for the reselling of copper lines for ADSL to competitors, same thing would have to happen for 3G and 4G wireless bandwidth.

3. Google can invest few billions in creating a global worldwide free wireless network using the White Spaces 700Mhz unlicenced bandwidth. US has already voted for it. EU is about to vote for it. Google would deploy it using the FON.com model, mass produce $20 routers that convert any ADSL/Cable/Fiber at Home connection into a 700Mhz White Spaces hotspot that reaches throughout neibourhoods, employing clever signal strength modulation to optimize bandwidth, using a global standard for automatic authentication on those connections. This would create a global free wireless broadband network. Best of all, it could be built to cover the whole world in just a few months! As 700Mhz White Spaces reaches upwards kilometers per hotspot, covering a whole city with free wireless bandwidth only takes a few hundred such routers, or lets say, a few thousand of these. If they can be mass manufactured at the same price as a WiFi router, for below $20 each, then the cost of covering a whole city with free wireless bandwidth is counted in just the few tens of thousands of dollars. Google can afford covering whole countries fast like this.

Thanks for your infos. Mostly what I mean with including Chrome is to have that full web browsing 100% fully optimized for ARM, I don’t know if it could be somehow just extracted from Chrome OS and put on top of Android as an app, perhaps using the new Gingerbread Android NDK native development kit. For sure Google must be working on that, to make Android Laptops more meaningful as well, I tried to ask Google about it about 6 months ago: http://138.2.152.197/2010/06/02/google-qa-chrome-browser-as-just-an-app-in-android-smartbooks/

Cool yes, but do you think the Chrome browser on ARM is fast enough yet fully utilizing all available hardware acceleration for optimal smooth high resolution multi-tab web browsing? I guess Google may be keeping some of the Chrome OS source codes internally while they tweak things with some of the initial OEM manufacturers before trying to release these Chrome OS laptops.

Just as the question of how Motorola optimized Firefox to have it run on their Atrix 4G, if they just took what’s there in the open source or if a bunch of specific hardware optimizations have been a big part of the work.

Also recall that OLPC’s latest iteration on ARM is already running Fedora for ARM. So the sources are out there and all they need to do is grab is customise it and put some good UI on it and we’ll all be singing to church.