All the rumors about Google’s ‘Chrome OS’ release date being sometime this week turned out to be partially true. Google revealed Chrome OS wednesday, but not in the form of a launch. They announced that from here on out the entire project will be open source, which you can check out here. The scheduled launch date is sometime in late 2010, but you can currently download a free VMware image (for use with VMware). For more on how to download/install Chrome OS watch the video tutorial below.

My first impressions of Chrome OS are not very good. I understand that it’s supposed to be a web based operating system and that’s where they’re putting all their focus, but I think they’re focusing a little too much on it. Since it is currently only in a beta state I can understand why it would be slow and buggy, but the overall OS just doesn’t impress me. First of all it doesn’t even look like an OS, it looks exactly like the Chrome browser, which I would be ok with if it actually functioned differently then the Chrome Browser.

The only difference I can tell so far is the ‘Applications’ tab on the far left. This isn’t so much as an applications tab so much as it is a quick links tab. This is also understandable because google stated that every app on Chrome OS is going to be a web app. I’m not really thrilled about the idea because I just don’t see how it can be implemented without holding back tons of features that can’t be created in web apps. Maybe after it’s launched the ‘App’ developers will come by the thousands and  create something as awesome as the iPhone app store. But right now there’s nothing like that and all I see in this beta version of Chrome OS is a slow and buggy Chrome web browser. I would definitely recommend trying it out though, so let me know what you think.