If the conference’s focal point on day one was Android, Day 2 was Chrome-centric. There had been a lot of notes on HTML5, Chrome and Chrome OS, and the entire show was neatly tailored together for developers and ordinary geeks (like me) to enjoy. It was stirring, as I feel it to be more realistic and likely to develop beyond the conference’s day-1 focus on Android.

There are a few things that caught my attention. First is the release of Chrome, then the Chrome Store version of Angry Birds, and of course, Google being awfully generous compared to Apple when it comes to Market fees.  It’s mere 5% tax on items put up in the Chrome Store, giving the seller 95% of the revenue, is a munificent move that it comes off as a necessary strategy.

But the generosity didn’t stop there. Google was even nice enough to give a Google CR-48 netbooks (aka Chromebook) as part of the pilot program. The commercial Chromebooks will be shipped starting June from manufacturers Samsung and Acer. The difference between the pilot CR-48 netbook from the commercial version is the processor, the latter running dual-cores. The hardware specs stays the same (pretty much).

On the negative side, the commercially available Chromebooks costs way too much. The 3G model from Samsung is $500, that which is priced on par with a nice 15-inch laptop running on Windows 7 where you can just run the Chrome browser in full screen to get the look and feel of the Chrome OS. The prices have to drop, or so I assert. Google was also promoting a subscription model where business can get Chromebook for $28 per month, and $20 per month for an education plan, inclusive of support. However, there has to be at least 10 plans with a 3-year contract (minimum) in order to avail it. To add insult to injury, the only way to get an early termination is if you shell out the rest of the contract (another way of saying you simply can’t terminate it).

The conference sure was fun. If you happen to have missed it due to inevitable constraints, here’s the page of the keynotes up on Youtube.