New Chrome OS features: File handlers, inline media players and more

Chromebooks, the just announced notebooks optimized to run Chrome OS, will benefit from new features in Chrome OS. When Google introduced Chrome OS a year ago, many people wondered how useful the upcoming notebooks would be the software’s clunky handling of external storage, your documents and other items. Google has been perfecting Chrome OS with these specific concerns in mind and today they dispelled myths that Chromebooks won’t be a fit for the average Joe Schmuck.

First up, Chrome OS has built-in players for music and video that show your content in a panel form factor by default. You can, however, take your video to fullscreen with a simple click. Another sought-after feature is a file manager that pops up when you slide a USB thumb drive or other peripherals to a Chromebook. But what about photos?

As you can see in the image below, a file manager pops up when you slide an SD card into a Chromebook. A local file handler then takes over – Picasa web app in this case – to handle your files. A stage demo included showed the Picasa handler beaming images directly to the Picasa cloud, allowing you to share uploaded photos with everyone in an instant and have a cloud backup in case you lose your Chromebook. The same logic applies to other data types, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations. In fact, any web app can register itself as a handler for local files in Chrome OS.

Is this cool or what? Get your credit cards ready, Chromebooks are hittin Amazon on June 15.