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Phone Hub shows all kinds of useful controls for a paired Android phone.
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The “Tote” section shows recent files and you can also pin them here.
Google
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Close sharing between Chrome and Android, soon, in a few months.
Google
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The clipboard.
Google
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Google Assistant ‘Quick Answers’ lets you highlight a word to show definitions.
Google
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The screen recorder app.
Google
Google is today celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Chromebook, and the latest version of Chrome OS, version 89, is celebrating with the release of a ton of features for the stable branch.
The first is the Phone Hub, which will allow users to pair an Android phone and control it remotely via a small pop-up panel in the system tray. The panel shows the phone’s status like battery and signal, hotspot control shortcuts, silence and phone location, it also shows the two most recent Chrome tabs. Notifications from your phone will be sent to Chrome OS and you can even remotely reply to a text message.
Sharing between devices is also getting better. Chrome OS will now pull down your list of Wi-Fi passwords from an Android phone, so you only have to enter this super secure password once and it will be shared with your other devices (Google OS). Google’s Nearby Share, in the Airdrop style, has been on the Android phone since last year, and now Google says that “in the coming months”, you will be able to share between Chrome OS and Android.
Chrome OS has a new “Tote” section that shows recently created files. It sits in the system tray, similar to the phone sections and quick settings. In the file application, you can also pin important files in the Tote section for later use. There is a new screen capture tool that also drops files in the Tote section. You can take screenshots or videos, and the gallery tool has a new “annotation” feature, so you can draw on photos.
Some features seem to be extracted directly from Android, such as the circular icon background for everything and a media player in the quick settings.
Pressing the “All button” (replacing Caps Lock from Chrome OS) + V will open the new clipboard, which will save your last five copied icons. You can right-click on a word to open “Quick Answers”, which will list a definition, translation or unit conversion provided by the Google Assistant.
That’s about it. Chrome OS is still a very simple operating system, but there are some nice short additions. Most of them look like Google is giving its best impression on MacOS, the operating system that Chrome has recently surpassed in market share.
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