According to reports from sources in China, Google may be readying a touchscreen Chomebook tablet which will be running its Chrome OS, but is set to be Google branded. Usually the search giant would team up with a consumer device manufacturer to handle the hardware side; this time it seems to go it alone and  have Taiwanese Compal Electronics  build the tablet, with the touchscreen coming in from Wintek. The device is rumored to be released in early 2013.

As reported in the China Commercial Times, the device will have a 12.8 inch touchscreen with some 200,000 units to be made, although some suggest figures of upto 20 million but that looks like it is a error quoted number.

There have been attempts of Chrome OS on notebooks before from Acer and Samsung, but these have fared quite poorly with consumers and registering low sale numbers. Now Google, having seen rivals like Microsoft and Apple introduce smaller touch tablets, that they too would like to give it another try. Chrome OS is much more similar to another mobile OS due out soon, FireFox OS from Mozilla, which also has apps that live and work in the cloud and other servers. HTML5 and JavaScript, used to develop web based apps, are increasingly making bigger in roads compared to native coding environments as they can be written once and run on every major platform with little to no changes made to the underlying code.

The big issue and strange position to be in, is of Google having two mobile OSs’ to develop, support and push into the markets; Chrome and Android. It would better to focus their time and money on one platform that is doing very well, Android, and to do new exciting things with. Many users have long asked for a PC or laptop that are specifically made to run Android and natively support touch, keyboard and mouse. Android is already quite diversified amongst manufacturers, phone specs, tablets and off-shoots like Amazon Kindle, that having another OS will mix it up even more. Or, how about a dual boot Android and Chrome OS  device getting the best of both and access to many more combined apps and games?