ace hotel

Chromebooks Take Flight on Virgin America

Frederic Lardinois

30 Jun 2011 — 1 min read

Google is definitely trying its best to get the word out about its ChromeOS-based Chromebooks. Now, the company has teamed up with Virgin America – one of the Silicon Valley’s favorite (yet perennially money-losing) airlines – to offer travellers to “test-fly” Chromebooks for free onboard their flights and at select gates from July to the end of September. Chromebook users – including those who bring their own ChromeOS-powered laptops on board – will also get free WiFi courtesy of Virgin America and Gogo. Travelers who stay in New York’s Ace Hotel will also find a Chromebook in their rooms.

Virgin America and Google are also setting up special “Chrome Zones” at the airline’s gates in San Francisco’s Terminal 2, Boston’s Logan Airport, Chicago’s O’Hare and the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.

The point here, of course, is to familiarize potential Chromebook users with the idea of a web-only laptop that, at first glance, seems like it would be less functional than a regular laptop. By focusing on flyers, Google can demonstrate the long battery life of these devices.

On the other hand, though, this experiment obviously only works because there is WiFi on Virgin America’s planes. On flights without WiFi, the Chromebook is dead in the water right now, as Google still hasn’t made offline versions of most of its productivity apps available yet.

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

Google used to be a company where experimentation was encouraged -- or at least it felt like that from the outside. Now it's hard to remember when Google last launched a new product that was an immediate hit. But with NotebookLM and its AI podcasts, Google finally scored

🪧 Pressed words

I don't think anyone outside of Matt Mullenweg had the recent WordPress/WP Engine drama on their bingo card for this year. After a bit of early confusion, I think it's now clear that this is, in many ways, an extension of the open source discussions

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

I've followed the development of quantum computing for the better part of the last decade. For the longest time, it's been "just around the corner" and with the advent of generative AI, any of the hype around the technology has receded into the background.

The week after CrowdStrike

It's been a week... Given everything that's happened lately, it's hard to believe that the CrowdStrike outages hit only a week ago. We're now deep in the clean-up phase of that particular disaster and while the blame for this particular incident falls

Read more

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

🪧 Pressed words

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

The week after CrowdStrike