Samsung Series 5

Here’s a head-scratcher for you: Google makes the Chrome OS and Android operating systems. So up until now, what happened if you plugged an Android phone or tablet into a laptop running Chrome OS? Nothing.

While you can mount your Android device to a PC, Mac, or Linux computer using a USB cable and copy files to and from your phone or tablet, Chromebooks simply didn’t have that feature… until yesterday. That’s when Google rolled out a stable channel updated for Chromebooks including the Acer AC700, Samsung Series 5, and Cr-48 adding USB mounting support for ANdroid.

The update also added settings for Google Cloud Print services, the ability to forget VPN connections, more SSH options, security updates, and a few other changes.

Google also recently rolled out experimental support for opening ZIP files in the Chrome OS file browser. The idea behind Chrome OS is that users will spend most of their time interacting with web sites and web apps rather than local files, but these two updates are a nod to the fact that computer users still expect to be able to access local files — even if all you’re going to do is use the computer to upload those files to the cloud.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers