Google has finally launched its immensely popular Chrome web browser for Android devices, bringing a speedy and simple browsing experience to smartphones and tablets.
Before you get excited, you should know that right now the app is a beta and is only available to those who have devices running Android 4.0 – aka Ice Cream Sandwich – so that means the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, Motorola Xoom for example. It will become available on older versions of Android in the near future of course; Google just wants to test it on its latest and greatest OS first.
Chrome for Android links up with Chrome on your PC so you can take your favourite websites, search history and more with you when you leave the house and go mobile. You’ll even be able to leave tabs open in Chrome on your PC, open up Chrome on your Android phone or tablet and there they are. Bookmarks are also wirelessly synchronised between your Android device and your PC, which rounds off the PC sync features nicely.
As for the design and user interface; just as with Chrome for PC, Google has designed it with ease of use and simplicity in mind. They’ve not just copied Chrome and tweaked it a little to suit phones and tablets; the app has been built from scratch with mobile devices in mind. We’ve given it a spin already on our Galaxy Nexus and it really is nippy – certainly a valid alternative to the native Android browser.
Tabs can be viewed like a deck of cards and flicked through with speed and ease – this is one of the best features of the app we’ve seen, check it out if you haven’t already.
Of course, being Chrome it has the infinitely useful ‘omnibox’ which combines the URL bar with a search bar. You can simply type a search result into the bar at the top of the screen for speedy access to Google, or if you know a website’s address you can bang that in there and head straight to it.
Unfortunately Chrome for Android doesn’t support Flash, which is a bit of a pain when accessing certain sites. Of course, many sites have moved or are moving towards using HTML5 instead of Flash, but this is still something that we would like to see remedied in the full version.
If you have an Android smartphone or tablet running Ice Cream Sandwich you can download Chrome Beta for free right now from the Android Market. Let us know your thoughts on our comments below or via our @Gadget_Helpline Twitter page or Official Facebook group.