Chrome has announced their Pro Series messenger bag named after one of my favorite European cities, Berlin. Built tough with over 15 years of messenger bag experience behind them, Chrome guarantees the bag for life. Yep… for life.

With over 15 years experience designing and manufacturing bags, Chrome introduces a new professional series messenger bag called the “Berlin”. The Berlin was designed from the bottom up, incorporating a completely new pattern and a functional four-point harness system. Working with professional messengers on this project for the last year has allowed Chrome to dial in all necessary features that messengers rely on. The end result; the Berlin is the best messenger bag Chrome has ever made.

• Weatherproof 1,000 denier Cordura outer shell
• 18 oz. weatherproof truck tarp liner sealed with military spec. seam binding
• New pattern allows for significantly increased capacity.
• Secondary shoulder strap with four point adjustment system for large loads
• External strap system for oversized packages
• Velcro accessory mounting strap
• EVA foam padded shoulder strap and back panel

The Berlin Pro Series messenger bag clocks in at $220 bucks… and worth it.

[ Chrome Berlin ] [ Related: Pabst Blue Ribbon & Chrome Bags ]

Guess what I got running via VMWare Fusion? If you guessed the recently shown off Google Chrome OS you’d be right. So far, it feels a bit unoptimized and slow but I’m only giving it only 512mb of RAM, 1 virtual processor on my Mac Mini running VMWare Fusion 2.06. I’ll retry in a bit once I’ve installed VMWare 3.0. Make sure that you use bridged and not NAT for your networking setup otherwise you’ll not be able to login.

This build of the Chrome OS is running 4.0.253.0 (32516). And speaking of logins, at the login screen (seen below) you input your Gmail login and password in order to login.

To get your download running, you will need a couple of things. If you have one of the VMWare [ site here ] applications, on the Mac it’s VMWare Fusion which has recently been upgraded to version 3.0, that’s a good start. Some people have used VirtualBox, which is free, and I have on the PC, but have yet to attempt. Then you will need to head over to via gdgt.com [ site here ] and download the Google Chrome OS VMWare Image.

You will need a login to their site, which is free, painless and takes like 1 minute to obtain a login.

Helpful tips, if you download it:
1.) To use the vmdk file, open VMware and create a new virtual machine. One of the options will be to use an “existing virtual disk.” (In VMware Fusion, this is the last option below, “use operating system disk” and “use OS disc image file.”)
2.) Make sure your VM is set to use bridged networking, rather than NAT.
3.) The username and password to login to Chrome OS / Chromium OS is your google account!

Alternatively, if you don’t have VMware, some users have had luck getting this image to run using VirtualBox, which is a free cross-platform (Windows / Mac / Linux) virtual machine created by Sun Microsystem.

Again, I haven’t tried the VirtualBox method yet, but might try it out on my main Windows PC later today. So far, it’s quirky, has twice randomly stopped on me, but for something that’s coming out next year, I could easily see using this on my OQO 01+ as a web only way to access the web and get to the internet when I’m mobile and want access to a full-blown Flash player and a keyboard. Can’t wait for the final release in the second half of 2010.

[ gdgt ] [ VirtualBox ] [ VMWare ] [ Related: Chrome OS as Open Source Project ]

Well, today Google announced the upcoming Google Chrome OS. I never thought I’d say this, but this is a good thing for the casual user that use their netbooks or lower powered computers that only need to access the Internet for mail, communication and other web related items.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Now… let’s see how advertising works it way into this.

[ Google Chrome OS Announcement ]

With Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, alongside some other more esoteric web browsers, like the Mozilla based K-Meleon [ site here ] for instance, are great and it’s finally good to have options. But for another new player to enter the market, it better do something awesome or different.

Well, enter the Lunascape browser. It features not one, not two… but three browser engines in one. Lunascape includes the rendering engines for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome/Safari all in one browser with the ability to switch between the rendering engines and use Firefox or Internet Explorer add-ons alongside the other engines.

Lunascape, the Triple Engine browser, now supports Triple Add-ons and provides you with more advanced yet easy-to-use interfaces. We consider this as an important step towards the unified browsing platform. With Lunascape, you can have all you need to interact with the Web in a single platform that is personalized just for you.

Lunascape is now compatible with the expanding array of Firefox add-ons in addition to the already supported Internet Explorer add-ons and Lunascape plug-ins. Transferring your add-ons from Firefox 3.5 is very easy.

Sounds rather good despite being Windows only at the moment and having a slightly slower than I’d like interface. But this is beta software with improvements forthcoming.

[ Lunascape 6 Beta ]