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Google I/O 2012 Day 2 Recap: Chrome and Drive hits iOS, New Chromebooks, Docs Goes Offline and More

Akansha Srivastava

On the second day of its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Google again captured interest of the tech media world with the roll out of slew of improvements to its major web consumer offerings.

To sum it up, the company released integrated Google Chrome for the iPhone and the iPad, updates to Google Docs, Google Drive, Chrome OS and launched Compute Engine.

Here's a brief detailing of all the breakthrough improvements made by the search engine giant to its products so far:

Google Chrome: Introduced for iPhone and iPad

Kicking off the event, Sundar Pichai, Google's SVP of Chrome and apps disclosed that Chrome browser is being used by more than 310 million people worldwide. Taking the cue, Google Chrome browser product manager Brian Rakowski broke on the stage to announce some new capabilities for developers.

Rakowski showcased how 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 touching the touchscreens or typing.

The most striking announcement about Chrome was a new deal with tech giant Apple and a version of the Chrome browser for the iPhone and the iPad has got into the App Store and is available for download now.

As per information, Google Chrome for iOS will feature all the tab syncing and credential syncing features of Chrome for Android, allowing users to carry over their settings, browsing history and logins from any device to the Apple's iPhone and iPad.

Google Drive: Available on iOS and Chrome OS

The file storage and sync service introduced by Google in April this year also gathered a bit of news at the event. Clay Bavor, director of product management for Google Apps informed that more than 10 million people began using Google Drive "in just over 10 weeks" after its release.

Along with that, Bavor also announced that the new cloud-syncing storage platform will be now available on iOS and Chrome OS.

Bavor further demoed Google Drive on an iPad and Chrome OS. On iPad, he searched for a picture of a pyramid and Drive offered up saved images of the Egyptian pyramids. On Chrome OS, he showed the Drive icon in the application tray and its real time functionality.

Elaborating on the features, it was noted that now Google Drive will let the users save Word documents for offline editing. The users can also add people to collaborate from within the app; moreover, real time collaboration will work across all devices for real time document updating on tablets and phones. Additionaly, apps in the Chrome app store will be allowed to use Drive, to do things like send faxes and receive other files into Drive.

Google also announced a Drive SDK version 2, which would be storing files created with third party apps alongside everything else.

Google claimed 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. Reportedly, the game ran very smoothly in the demo, and looked a lot like a game running on a gaming console.

Google Docs: Offline Capabilities

The other big announcement at the event was offline editing in Google Docs. In Chrome, users will now be able to edit documents with all the same formatting options as the online version. Chrome will save a local copy of the document, and sync it as soon as the device gets an Internet connection.

This new feature is available now for Docs, and Google also confirmed that they will introduce editing for spreadsheets and presentations soon.

Chromebooks Go Retail

Google announced that its new Chromebooks are three times faster than the original and will be available in 100 US Best Buy stores and other retail outlets across the U.S. Google also revealed that the company is working with a series of computer makers to release more Chromebooks by the Christmas season.

Google Compute Engine - Amazon Rival

Google also introduced Google Compute Engine, an infrastructure-as-a-service offering, contesting a direct completion with Amazon Web Services EC2.

Urs Holzle, SVP of technical infrastructure said Google Compute Engine delivers "50 percent more compute per dollar than other cloud providers," presumably in reference to Amazon and Microsoft Windows Azure.

Boasting results from its AppEngine product, which Google claimed supports over 1 million applications, and some 7.5 billion hits per day, the company described Compute Engine as providing Linux virtual machines, on 'Google Scale.' The goal is to provide application developers the ability to turn up virtual machines, along with high-performance storage and connectivity to their users through Google's networks.

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