At an event in London at Google's headquarters attended by TechRadar, Senior Product Manager of Search Anders Sandholm "chuckled nervously" in response to the question of whether Chrome OS would include multitouch capability, the technology made ubiquitous largely by Apple's iconic iPhone. It's one of the glaring omissions from the Nexus One, so much so that there's a hack to enable multitouch support available.
Sandholm went on to respond, "I can't... I mean... right now we are targeting netbooks, that's what we're focused on, but I expect it to work well... we expect it to target everything up to desktop computers. Chrome OS will be built for a specific hardware setup."
Adding touch capability to Chrome OS would position it as another operating system suitable for a tablet. We're already seeing a lot of upcoming alternatives to Apple's new iPad tablet device, and a lot of them are running Google's other operating system, Android. If Google wants to go directly into the ring against Apple in the tablet race -- and both logic and rumor indicate that's highly likely -- it will be interesting to see whether Android or Chrome OS would be the chosen system to power the device.
Now that so many of us are used to touch-based controls thanks to our smartphones, it makes sense that multitouch may find its way into more netbook, laptop and desktop offerings as well. Building touch into Chrome OS would position Google well to take advantage of that coming trend.