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.