The machines, made by Acer and Samsung, will go on sale next month.

Unlike conventional computer systems which use installed software like Microsoft Word, Chrome is built around web-based applications such as Google Docs.

Some analysts have questioned whether users will want laptops that rely so heavily on an internet connection.

However, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, hailed the technology as a “new model of computing”.

His comments came on the second day of the company’s developer conference, where Google announced that so-called Chromebooks will go on sale in June.

Samsung and Acer will be the first manufacturers to offer the devices, for between $349 and $499, in the US and six European countries initially.

Google’s aim is to encourage people to use web-based applications, claiming that that is where most people spend their time and that most tasks can be accomplished online.

The internet giant said because Chromebooks are not weighed down by software and applications common to most laptops, they boot up in eight seconds instead of minutes.

The company said battery life on the device will last a day, security updates will be done automatically and they will be faster than traditional laptops.

“It’s a much easier way to compute… and Chromebook is venturing into a new model of computing that I don’t think was possible even a few years ago,” said Mr Brin.

“Ultimately the most precious resource is the user’s time. I think the complexity of managing your computer is really torturing users out there. It is a flawed model and I think Chromebooks are a new model and this is the way things are going to be,” added Mr Brin.

‘Nothing but the web’

Six months ago a prototype of the Chromebook was introduced.

The CR-48 was given to developers, businesses, schools, journalists and reviewers to play around with and test.

During the Google IO conference, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president for Chrome, said that the pilot had over one million participants.

He told BBC News that the feedback from that programme helped underscore his belief that users are more than ready for this new shift in computing.

“Most people spend all their time on the web, and for the first time we have distilled the entire computing experience to be about nothing but the web,” he told BBC News.

“Today, most computers work where you have to interact with them and manage them. We have switched that around and I am genuinely convinced almost everyone is ready for it today.”

There is some scepticism among those who follow the industry that ordinary consumers will embrace the move away from the norm.

“I think it is the future of computing, but I am not quite convinced it is the present of computing,” said Steven Levy, senior writer at Wired Magazine and the author of a newly-released book on Google called In The Plex.

“Having used one of these CR-48′s, I found some problems like in a number of cases not being able to get connectivity or get on fast enough. It wasn’t as good an experience as my regular environment.

“That said I do think it is a great nudge to push us into what is the logical future of computing, but Google has to go out and sell this to convince everybody of that view,” added Mr Levy.

The first Chromebooks will be available for order in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands from June 15.

The price for the Samsung version will start at $430 (£265) for a Wi-Fi powered device and $499 (£308) for a 3G model. An Acer machine will start at $350 (£216).

Price, said Michael Gartenberg, a senior analyst with research firmGartner, could be a stumbling block.

“The hardware looks interesting, but the problem Google and its partners are going to have is convincing someone to spend $499 (£308) on a device that looks like a laptop but does so many fewer things.

“A $499 laptop can also run Chrome and get most of the Chrome apps. I think people were looking for Google to not only come up with some sort of computing innovation, but to come up with some pricing innovation as well. And at $349-$499 (£216-£308), it is going to be a hard sell for consumers,” Mr Gartenberg told the BBC.

Microsoft challenge

One area commentators think Google and its manufacturing partners might have some success is with the business world and also in education.

That will cover things like the cost of the device, necessary support, as well as machine upgrades and replacements.

Mr Pichai told a roomful of around 5,000 developers that the Google initiative would be one-third of what he estimated was the average $1,000 (£615) annual IT cost per employee.

Google is also offering a similar package to schools for $20 (£12) monthly fee per user.

“If they can make Chromebooks work for business and schools, it has the potential to be a lot cheaper for them, because they don’t have to manage them and buy software, and they get replaced when they break,” said Ina Fried, senior editor with technology sitesAllThingsDigital.

“It is a really appealing vision for these sectors, but I also think that businesses and even students will find it hard to break away from the PC entirely, a way of working that many people have gotten used to over the years.”

Google said that later in the year it expects a number of other manufacturers to offer Chromebooks at a number of different price points.

The company confirmed that the e-mail addresses of up to 25,000 customers who had registered for product updates may have been stolen as a result.

Resumes of 350 people applying for jobs in its Canadian office could also have been copied from the web servers.

Square Enix, which makes the popular Final Fantasy, Deus Ex and Tomb Raider games, apologised for the breach.

In a statement, it said: “Square Enix can confirm a group of hackers gained access to parts of our Eidosmontreal.com website as well as two of our product sites.

“We immediately took the sites offline to assess how this had happened and what had been accessed, then took further measures to increase the security of these and all of our websites, before allowing the sites to go live again.”

It is understood that the websites affected were Eidosmontreal.com, run by Square Enix’s subsidiary Eidos, and Deusex.com, a promotional site for the forthcoming game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Scammer’s dream

Graham Cluley, a consultant at security firm Sophos, warned that both leaks could cause problems for the individuals concerned.

“With the e-mail there is a danger that gamers could be e-mailed by someone pretending to be from the company who gets them to click on a link or run some malicious software,” he told BBC News.

“The resumes are a blueprint for identity theft. They have everything that scammers want. The only thing missing is credit card information.”

Square Enix emphasised that it does not hold customers’ credit card data on its web servers.

It also said there was no evidence that the information had been distributed.

The company said that the data might have fallen into the hands of an “unauthorised person” following a hacking attack on its online service.

Access to the network was suspended last Wednesday, but Sony has only now revealed details of what happened.

Users are being warned to look out for attempted telephone and e-mail scams.

In a statement posted on the official PlayStation blog, Nick Caplin, the company’s head of communications for Europe, said: “We have discovered that between April 17 and April 19 2011, certain PlayStation Network and Qriocity service user account information was compromised in connection with an illegal and unauthorized intrusion into our network”.

The blog posting lists the personal information that Sony believes has been taken.

• Name
• Address (city, state/province, zip or postal code)
• Country
• E-mail address
• Date of birth
• PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login
• Handle/PSN online ID

Mr Caplin added: “It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained.

“For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams that ask for personal or sensitive information.”

Read the full text of Sony’s PlayStation hack apology here.

Credit cards

Sony admitted that credit card information, used to purchase games, films and music, may also have been stolen.

“While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility,” Mr Caplin said.

“If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained.”

Sony has not given any indication of how many PlayStation Network users may have had their information taken, but the service has around 77 million members worldwide.

Investigation

The UK’s information commissioner, Christopher Graham, said that his organisation had already begun investigating the Sony hack.

He told BBC Radio 4′s “You and Yours” programme, that it looked like “a very significant breach of data protection law”.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has the power to impose fines of up to £500,000.

However, Mr Graham stressed that his ability to take action would ultimately depend on whether data from the PlayStation Network was stored in the UK – something he was still trying to establish.

“It if turns out that it is our responsibility here in the UK, we would ask ‘were the security measures appropriate’,” he added.

‘PR Disaster’

The theft of so much detailed customer data would be seen as a “public relations disaster”, according to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos.

“This is a big one,” he told BBC News.

“The PlayStation Network is a real consumer product. It is in lots of homes all over the world.

“The impact of this could be much greater than your typical internet hack.”

Mr Cluley warned that, even without credit card details, the information taken was enough to help criminals carry out further attacks on other services.

“Some people will use the same passwords on other sites. If I was a hacker right now, I would be taking those e-mail addresses and trying those passwords,” he said.

User anger

PlayStation users got their first indication that something was wrong with the service when it became unavailable on Wednesday 20 April.

In the following days, Sony issued three brief statements asking users to be patient while it investigated an “external intrusion”, or hack.

However, the fact that it took almost seven days for the company to reveal that data had been taken has angered some gamers.

Commenting on the Sony blog, Tacotaskforce wrote: “You waited a week to tell us our personal information was compromised? That should have been said last Thursday.”

Another user Sid4peeps wrote: “This update is about 6 days late. I think it is time to move to the other network, no regard for customers here.”

But some PlayStation users appeared to be happy with Sony’s handling of the matter. Ejsponge61 commented: “Wow, this is alot of info. Thanks, this is very much appreciated by all of us PlayStation fans.”

The Sony PlayStation Network remains unavailable to users. The company has not said when service will be restored.

The average speed for mobile broadband in the Buckinghamshire town was 1.73Mbps (megabits per second), compared to 3.6Mbps in Peterborough, the fastest town.

Mobile speeds are increasingly crucial to users as smartphones become ubiquitous.

The data was compiled by broadband comparison website Top10.com.

It analysed thousands of 3G speed tests carried out by users of its Streetstats 3G app. The app is only available for the iPhone, meaning the data only looks at speeds available via Apple’s handsets.

At 1.73Mbps it would take up to 10 seconds to load a webpage and over two minutes to download an app such as the popular Angry Birds game.

Disparity

Birmingham, Liverpool and Cardiff also featured in the slowest 10 towns, according to its research.

Alex Buttle, director of Top10 said: “There’s clearly a disparity when it comes to 3G connectivity across the UK. Despite efforts by the government and mobile operators to increase the speed of 3G services, there is evidently still a long way to go.”

The fastest UK town according to the data was Peterborough with an average of 3.86Mbps. It was followed by Carlisle (3.5Mbps), Eastbourne (3.47Mbps) and Stoke (3.35Mbps).

Other towns in the top 10 included York, Dundee, Brighton, Derby and Reading – all offering speeds over 3Mbps.

UK regulator Ofcom is conducting its own research into mobile broadband speeds. The results are due later this month.

Next year the government is auctioning off spectrum which will allow mobile operators to introduce faster, 4G services.

A study conducted by a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich found that investors following stock market tweets could have achieved an average return rate of 15%.

Timm Sprenger analysed 250,000 tweets sent over a six-month period.

He predicts Twitter will increasingly offer specialised information to users.

Thousands of stock-related messages are sent every day via tweets. Tweeting investors mark tweets according to company stock symbols.

There was “a striking co-ordination” between what Twitter was saying about shares and other information from investors and analysts, he found.

“I don’t think it is the Holy Grail to make millions but it is a very credible and legitimate source,” he said.

He also found that more valuable information was retweeted, meaning that it reached a wider audience.

The study formed the basis of the website TweetTrader.net where the real-time sentiment for individual stocks can be accessed. The site is currently in beta (trial).

Mr Sprenger conducted similar research on the federal elections in Germany last year. Using Twitter, he was able to predict the final results for each political party to within 2% of the votes they received.

“We got as close as the research institutions that spent hundreds of thousands of pounds,” he said.

Twitter already extrapolates the information that is most-talked about via its Trending Topics feed.

Mr Sprenger predicts that it will increasingly offer more specialised versions of the service.

Derwent Capital Markets, a London-based family-owned hedge fund already offers investors the chance to use Twitter to guage the mood of the stock market.

It follows tweets and charts the number of times certain words rise above or fall below average.

The fund uses a tracker developed by academics from the universities of Indiana and Manchester.

In October the researchers published a paper – Twitter mood predicts the stock market – in which they claimed that a change in emotion expressed via Twitter would be followed by an equivalent change in the Dow Jones index.

They said they could predict its movements with 87% accuracy.

More than 15 million iPads have been sold since Apple launched the gadget in 2010.

The latest version of Google’s Android OS is called Honeycomb and it has been specifically optimised for tablets.

The features include the ability to buy applications from a computer, buy features inside the app, video chat and improved graphics.

“This is a serious investment of years of design and engineering to really nail the experience for a larger screen,” Hugo Barra, Google’s director of products for mobile, told BBC News.

“This is not a large phone – we wanted tablets running Honeycomb to not just be bigger but also to be better.”

Motorola will be the first to bring a product running Honeycomb to market. Its Xoom device is due to go on sale this month, although a release date and price have not yet been revealed.

“Honeycomb brings Google closer to parity with Apple and underlines the battle between these two titans,” said Ben Parr, co-editor of technology news site Mashable.

“Google has its strengths especially in the cloud, with their open source platform and integration with other Google products like Gmail and Google docs,” he said. “But Apple has the design edge and a vast number of apps as well as a new iPad expected in the next couple of months.”

‘Big win’

Google’s announcement of a web-based version of the Android market is one that is seen as long overdue.

This now means that users can browse and buy apps directly from the web. Previously users had to purchase through the Android market directly from the device making it difficult to find, download and buy apps.

Thanks to the cloud, users can send apps directly to any Android device with just a few clicks of their mouse.

“There’s no wires, no synching with computers – none of that nonsense. Everything is connected,” said Chris Yerga, Android engineering director.

Technology blog TechCrunch called the webstore a “big win” for developers.

“It lowers the hurdle you have to go through to buy an app,” said Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch.

“If you are bored online, I can imagine a lot of people heading to the webstore and clicking on five apps before they have really thought about it.”

Making money

Google also unveiled in-app purchasing, a new feature to let developers make money by selling virtual goods and upgrades in their apps to consumers.

Convincing developers to back Android is seen as key to drawing in more customers.

So far Android has more than 100,000 apps in its store, while more than 300,000 have been created for Apple’s iOS.

At the launch of Honeycomb at Google’s California headquarters a number of developers showcased apps designed specifically using the new operating system.

CNN presented a new tablet optimised app while Disney said it would be joining the webstore with three apps including a version of the music rhythm game Tap Tap Revenge.

Disney’s head of mobile Bart Decrem said there had been more than 50 million downloads of Tap Tap Revenge on the iPhone alone.

“We have been waiting for in-app purchases and for Android to get to this stage. This really represents a general maturing of the platform and it’s a really important one,” said Mr Decrem.

‘Best foot forward’

Unlike Apple, Google does not make its own devices but gives its operating system to manufacturers for nothing. That approach has served it well in the smartphone market.

To date there are around 145 devices running on Android, including a handful of tablets.

Google said it would be up to hardware sellers when users would see Honeycomb appear in more tablets.

Motorola will be first out of the gate but LG and T-Mobile are expected to follow close behind with their upcoming G-Slate tablet.

“We’ve put our best foot forward and now it’s up to the ecosystem, the manufacturers, to make it flourish,” said Google’s Mr Barra.

He said some of the features in Honeycomb would find their way on to Android smartphones when that is updated.

But will Honeycomb help Google slay Apple, which has a new iPad out in the coming months?

That depends, says Ina Fried, senior editor of AllThingsD and the Mobilized blog.

“It’s a combination of what’s the speed, what’s the price of the device, what type of apps will be available and when.

“This is about other people’s products competing with the iPad. Clearly Google is putting a lot of resources into Android and with this first entry it’s going to be a fun thing to watch,” Ms Fried told BBC News.

The web giant has scanned millions of books and made them available online via its eBooks platform.

Google had negotiated the deal to settle a six-year-old class action suit claiming infringement of copyright.

But the New York court said the deal would “simply go too far”, giving Google an unfair competitive advantage.

Copyright concerns

Under the agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, Google would continue to digitise books and sell access online.

In return, the company would pay $125m (£76.9m) in royalties every year to the copyright owners of the books being scanned.

However, copyright concerns persisted, as the ownership of many of the works being scanned by Google could not be established, meaning many would be unable to claim the royalty payment.

“The [amended settlement agreement] would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case,” said judge Denny Chin.

The US Department of Justice has approved the ruling and said it was the “right result.”

It has been critical of Google’s deal, saying it would give Google exclusive rights to profit from “orphan works”, where the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

Gina Talamon, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the agreement “created concerns regarding antitrust, class certification and copyright issues.”

The agreement is also separately being investigated by the US Department of Justice on competition and copyright grounds.

Google’s plan

Google responded to the ruling saying it was ‘disappointing’.

“We’ll review the Court’s decision and consider our options,” said Google’s managing counsel, Hilary Ware.

“Like many others, we believe this agreement has the potential to open up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the US today,” she added.

“Regardless of the outcome, we’ll continue to work to make more of the world’s books discoverable online through Google Books and Google eBooks.”

Google has already scanned some 15 million books.

It uses the strange “quantum states” of matter to perform calculations in a way that, if scaled up, could vastly outperform conventional computers.

The 6cm-by-6cm chip holds nine quantum devices, among them four “quantum bits” that do the calculations.

The team said further scaling up to 10 qubits should be possible this year.

Rather than the ones and zeroes of digital computing, quantum computers deal in what are known as superpositions – states of matter that can be thought of as both one and zero at once.

In a sense, quantum computing’s one trick is to perform calculations on all superposition states at once. With one quantum bit, or qubit, the difference is not great, but the effect scales rapidly as the number of qubits rises.

The figure often touted as the number of qubits that would bring quantum computing into a competitive regime is about 100, so each jump in the race is a significant one.

“It’s pretty exciting we’re now at a point that we can start talking about what the architecture is we’re going to use if we make a quantum processor,” Erik Lucero of the University of California, Santa Barbara told the conference.

The team’s key innovation was to find a way to completely disconnect – or “decouple” – interactions between the elements of their quantum circuit.

The delicate quantum states the team creates in their qubits – in this case paired superconductors known as Josephson junctions – must be manipulated, moved, and stored without destroying them.

“It’s a problem I’ve been thinking about for three or four years now, how to turn off the interactions,” UCSB’s John Martinis, who led the research,” told BBC News.

“Now we’ve solved it, and that’s great – but there’s many other things we have to do.”

Qubits and pieces

The solution came in the form of what the team has termed the RezQu architecture. It is basically a blueprint for a quantum computer, and several presentations at the conference focused on how to make use of it.

“For me this is kind of nice, I know how I’m going to put them together,” said Professor Martinis.

“I now know how to design it globally and I can go back and try to optimise all the parts.”

RezQu seems to have an edge in one crucial arena – scalability – that makes it a good candidate for the far more complex circuits that would constitute a quantum computer proper.

“There are competing architectures, like ion traps – trapping ions with lasers, but the complexity there is that you have to have a huge room full of PhDs just to run your lasers,” Mr Lucero told BBC News.

“There’s already promise to show how this architecture could scale, and we’ve created custom electronics based on cellphone technology which has driven the cost down a lot.

“We’re right at the bleeding edge of actually having a quantum processor,” he said. “It’s been years that a whole community has blossomed just looking at the idea of, once we have a quantum computer, what are we going to do with it?”

Britton Plourde, a quantum computing researcher from the University of Syracuse, said that the field has progressed markedly in recent years.

The metric of interest to quantum computing is how long the delicate quantum states can be preserved, and Dr Plourde noted that time had increased a thousand fold since the field’s inception.

“The world of superconducting quantum bits didn’t even exist 10 years ago, and now they can control [these states] to almost arbitrary precision,” he told BBC News.

“We’re still a long way from a large-scale quantum computer but it’s really in my eyes rapid progress.”

The announcement in the budget should be worth around £7 million to the video games industry, a spokesman said.

It will mean studios can invest more in research and development, as well as hiring additional staff.

But it falls short of the specific tax relief that the industry wanted.

Dr Richard Wilson, TIGA chief executive said: “The R&D tax credits will deliver 60% to 70% more value to games studios than the current tax credit regime.”

But he was unhappy that the government had not gone further.

“Failure to deliver TIGA’s Games Tax Relief is a dismal decision that displays a complete lack of imagination and one which will leave the UK video games industry swimming against the tide internationally,” he said.

“Our key competitors have tax breaks for games production. The UK does not,” he said.

Canada, for example, saw its games industry grow by 33% between 2008 and 2010, while the UK sector declined by 9%.

Plans by Labour to introduce tax cuts for the games industry were scrapped by the incoming coalition government during its 2010 emergency budget.

Mozilla, which makes the number two web browser, has been keeping a real-time map showing where in the world users are installing the software.

Despite the rapid uptake, downloads have been slower for version 4 than its predecessor.

Over the past year, Firefox’s market share has declined slightly in the face of competition from Google’s Chrome.

Firefox 4 was made available for download less than a month after Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9, the latest version of its market-leading browser.

Both pieces of software promise users a faster, more secure online experience.

Firefox, like its rival, now makes extensive use of HTML 5 – the newest standard for the hypertext language used to build websites.

Both browsers also feature hardware acceleration for displaying web pages – drawing on the power of a computer’s graphics processor to improve the speed of complex visuals.

Declining share

Within its first 24 hours, more than 5.5 million users had downloaded Firefox 4. However, that falls short of the 8 million who downloaded version 3 on its release day in 2008.

The lower figure may be explained by the widespread availability of pre-release versions of Firefox 4 in the months ahead of its launch.

Firefox has enjoyed rapid growth since it first appeared in 2004. At its peak, in 2009 it held a 24% market share, according to Netmarketshare.

However, by February 2011 its slice of the browser market had fallen to 21%.

At the same time, Google’s Chrome browser has grown from 1% to 10%, according to the same figures.

Internet Explorer remains the dominant platform, although its fall has been the most precipitous – from 68% in March 2009 to 56% in February 2011.

Some analysts believe that Firefox could still secure a bigger piece of the increasingly fragmented market, especially among corporate users.

“Internet Explorer 9 is only for Windows Vista and 7. Two thirds of companies are still using Windows XP,” said Ovum analyst Richard Edwards.

“If you want to make the most of the HTML 5 stuff that is out there then you have to go to IE9 and a Windows 7 upgrade or switch to Firefox.

“That may be a significant opportunity for Firefox,” he said.