how this update wants to protect your battery

ChromeOS continues to improve on Chromebooks. Google is adding features to, among other things, optimize the battery of all devices.

Google has just released the M116 beta update for its Chrome OS. On the program, many features being tested on Google’s operating system and therefore its Chromebooks computers. After announcing with great fanfare the arrival of Android application streaming via a smartphone last month, the firm is improving several components of its system here and in particular the behavior of its keyboard and its charging.

Welcome improvements for Chromebooks

Google continues to improve its system with some handy features. First, the search on Chrome OS now applies to both your local files and Google Drive, with of course the possibility of filtering the results at will.

Chrome OS also adds optical character recognition (OCR) functionality to web pages and PDF files. Google uses its own artificial intelligence models here to recognize texts embedded in images. To activate the option, you will have to type “[chrome://flags]in the address bar and activate “#pdf-ocr”. Note that this feature will also soon arrive on the Chrome browser.

The user experience during the first launch of Chrome OS has also been simplified, notably approaching that of Windows or macOS. Your Chromebook will allow you to customize the system from the first seconds, such as scrolling the touchpad or the size of the screen.

Smart charging is coming to Chrome OS

In order to preserve your battery capacity, Chromebooks will now use AI to intelligently charge the battery. This will be charged to 80% base and then to 100% when the system has figured out when the user disconnects the power cable. The option can be activated from the settings, in the “Device” section then “Power supply”.

RGB keyboards on select Chromebooks will feature greater granularity of customization with the ability for the user to light up the areas they want. Again you will need to activate the “#multi-zone-rgb-keyboard” option in chrome://flags.

Finally, files from the Microsoft Office suite will be easily editable from a Chromebook. You will need to use the Microsoft 365 application as well as the Microsoft OneDrive cloud service to be able to work on Word, Excel and PowerPoint files via the office suite.

You can already test this beta version of Chrome OS via updates for your Chromebook.

To follow us, we invite you to download our Android and iOS application. You can read our articles, files, and watch our latest YouTube videos.