Google Rolls Out Chrome Browser Improvements, Chrome and Google Drive for iOS, Chromebooks Go On Sale

On Day Two of the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Google announced improvements to its Chrome browser, improvements to Google Docs, and Chrome and Google Drive for iPhone and iPad, among other things.

Unlike yesterday's announcements, the new features and services rolled out today (other than the Drive and Chrome apps announcements), seemed aimed at the developer crowd.

Here are the major pieces, by product, so far:

- Developers will now be able to easily build voice recognition into their Chrome apps. That will allow users to give commands to their apps without typing.
- Chrome for the iPhone and the iPad will become available later today.
- The new Chromebooks are three times faster than the original chromebooks. Chromebooks will soon go on sale in Best Buys and other retail outlets across the U.S. Google also says its working with a series of computer makers to release more Chromebooks by the Christmas season.
- In Google Drive, you can save word documents (spreadsheets and presentations later) for offline editing. You can add people to collaborate with you from within the app; real time collaboration works across all devices so you can see your document updating in real time on whatever tablet or phone you may be using. Apps in the Chrome app store can use Drive to do things like send faxes and receive other files into Drive.
- Google says that its cloud infrastructure is so powerful and scalable that developers can run their apps entirely in the cloud to as many users as they want "for a reasonable price." This was demonstrated by running an online gamed called Bulletstorm using Gaikai. The game ran very smoothly in the demo, and looked a lot like a game running on a gaming console.

Fun facts:
- Google says more than 310 million people worldwide now use the Chrome browser.
- Google says that more than 10 million people began using Google Drive "in just over 10 weeks" after its release.