gdgt

First, this arguing about offline capabilities is ridiculous. There are/will be many, many situations where "online-only" slows people WAY down, everybody knows this, and Google has always been about speed and simplicity. I can guarantee that the first official release of Chrome OS will include fully functional offline support for docs, gmail, calendar, etc, as well as capabilities to store or work with the encrypted cache like a regular file system.

With HTML5, Gears and O3D, applications will be able to take advantage of graphics acceleration and offline files, and knowing Google these will all soon work as fast (faster) than any competing Microsoft/Apple product. I would guess that there will be several apps demonstrating these capabilities by launch, and then the market for this kind of broadly compatible software is going to EXPLODE within a year after that.

As the nativeclient project matures, and if/when wine becomes a real, working alternative for XP or 7, these technologies will become integrated with the "browser as operating system" model, and the assumption that Chrome OS is in any way "limited" will cease to make any sense. This is about when the supported hardware will start to include full-size desktop systems and much more powerful hardware, and about when Microsoft can start packing up their stuff.

What do people think? Different predictions?

has anyone managed to open the hotmail app in Chrome OS?

the yahoo & googlemail apps work fine, if a little slow