Keeping Google's Consumer OS Options Straight 97
According to Engadget, among others, Google is expected to show off the state of the Chrome OS on Tuesday of this week, and perhaps even to show off a netbook running the cloud-centric system. Since many of the things that Chrome OS does are also within the scope of Google's other consumer OS, Android, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written a guide to the differences, as he sees them, between Android and Chrome OS.
Re:Straight (Score:4, Insightful)
ChromeOS vs Android - same as OS X vs iOS - the same Unix OS with a different interface and GUI libraries.
Re:Straight (Score:5, Informative)
Substantially more architectural difference.
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I sounds like the "chrome OS" that users see is really running remotely at Google, with only enough OS locally to support the browser. Basically, they've reinvented the thin client.
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No, not the same. OS X and iOS share most of the same frameworks and the same programming language, with the primary difference being the use of AppKit for standard apps and UIKit for touchscreen apps. Most non-interface code can run on both without modification.
Android, on the other hand, doesn't derive from Chrome OS, which is itself based around a web browser. They're totally different.
WARNING: Tech writer needs to learn tech! (Score:4, Interesting)
As for Android applications, where all the applications are Java-based and depend on Dalvik, I don’t see any way that those applications will run on Chrome OS.
Yes because putting a Java JIT engine in a browser is easy; putting a Dalvik JIT engine in a browser is impossible! Google has NO WAY to leverage the base of tools and programs already created for their first OS, they will have to start from scratch...
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What would the point in that be anyway? Why not just use Android?
The only use I see for Chrome OS is for dual boot to quickly check something online.
Re:WARNING: Tech writer needs to learn tech! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WARNING: Tech writer needs to learn tech! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Google understands the importance of a good UI that does what it's meant to do, easily. Android is designed around a touch screen concept. Chrome OS is designed around a standard mouse/touch pad and keyboard input combination. It's one of the reasons why Win Mobile failed all these years. They tried to force a desktop interface onto a device that most definitely could not be used as a desktop. It's also the reason why tablets didn't become popular when they were first introduced 5-6 years ago running Windows XP.
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which when you think about it is odd. ChromeOS is perfect for touch devices. a very simple, interface that has primarily one purpose and that is to surf the web.
keyboards are only so useful for that. The most data entry one does on the web is a quick email, or forms for ordering stuff.
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I'm not sure that Google -- a company that, after all, maintains a web-based office suite with a continuously-expanding feature set -- views the role of "what people will do on the web" the same way your comment suggests.
Google's current online offerings -- coupled with technology like Native Client that is a key technology for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS and which enables native code to be run in a browser sandbox --
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The way i increasingly see Android is as a external project that happens to piggy back on the Google brand recognition. It seems to break the goodwill that Google have been able to build up, any chance it gets.
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This is honestly not meant as an Android vs iOS statement. However, on my iPhone, I *rarely* open the wrong link. Once in a while (maybe once a week at most, and I use the browser many times a day) it happens, and I have to zoom the page to hit the correct link, when it's surrounded by a bunch of other links. But the vast majority of the time, it gets the right one. I wonder if Android uses a different heuristic for finding the touch point when your finger hits a big area.
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As the other poster said on iOS touching the wrong link is difficult. Maybe google should set some standards for touch resolution, as browsing the web on the iphone is a snap.
The only feature that I want is the send to my device (to send url's images, clipboard data to and from my phone. I can buy it for the iphone but then i have to use a third party to host the data.
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Yes because putting a Java JIT engine in a browser is easy; putting a Dalvik JIT engine in a browser is impossible!
Why? Its the same basic concept, all you need is something to run dalvic bytecode and render the output in an on-screen area.
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Re:WARNING: Tech writer needs to learn tech! (Score:4, Interesting)
First, Google can include things in Chrome OS that aren't part of the browser, and can allow the browser to provide access to them, so it wouldn't have to put the JIT engine in the browser.
Second, there is no reason that Google couldn't build a Dalvik engine into the browser if they chose to. Heck, Chrome already includes facilities to run sandboxed arbitrary native code (Native Client), so certainly Google doesn't show any signs of conforming to conventional ideas of what "can't" be done in the browser.
Google already has a Dalvik engine, building hooks for it into Chrome -- whether specific to Chrome OS or more generally -- is certainly not impossible.
Google explicitly stated a long time ago that their long-term plan was to converge the two platforms. I doubt that they have that plan and no vision of how to accomplish that, and "throw everything out and start over" is probably not the course to convergence they have in mind.
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Why Chrome OS now? (Score:2)
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Single signon to google apps in thirty seconds from cold boot.
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Single signon to google apps in thirty seconds from cold boot.
I already get this on my Macbook Pro with SSD (Sandforce). If I disable login prompt and have it auto-launch Safari, it takes literally 20 seconds to get to Gmail from boot.
I bet boot times are similar for say, a new Macbook Air which is a retail product.
OK so with high end hardware (Score:2)
you can do quite a bit better than a Chrome OS netbook can. The question becomes - how much did it cost to buy the Macbook Pro and then put a 3rd party SSD in it? Is a Chrome OS netbook without such power going to cost less (it certainly going to DO less than your setup so I can't imagine it would be as expensive)?
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Oh, then in that case, you get an extra $800 in your pocket. You may like your purchase, but there's definitely a market for this (hint: Schmidt's a big fan of SunRays).
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It could be less than 30 secs. I don't know. It will certainly cost over $800 less. Schmidt intends these to be appliances for enterprises running Google Apps (a.k.a. thin clients, a la SunRays, which he worked with).
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It's not a replacement, Chrome OS uses the Chrome Browser. It's a replacement for Windows/MacOSX/Ubuntu/etc, for people who just use web apps anyway, or to have a faster OS for dual-boot and access some site.
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run without MS windows nor Linux
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Chrome OS is a Linux-based OS. Maybe you meant without a full Linux desktop environment like KDE or Gnome?
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what else can Chrome OS do that Chrome Browser can't?
Force the user to maintain a google account. From 'the three differences link':
It's not a traditional fat-client...all of it's "applications" will be cloud-based.
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Wait, how would it force a specifically Google account?
Presumably, you can associate different local files with different web applications, which is about the only thing Chrome OS does other than show you webpages. Although Google has a spreadsheet offering, one of their Chrome OS demos was sticking a USB thumb drive into the netbook, clicking on an Excel document, and having it open in Microsoft's own Office Live.
So if you're that fucking paranoid, there's absolutely nothing about Chrome OS which forces yo
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It can be used by the user without going through the hoops of booting up another operating system and clicking through whatever desktop UI that presents to get to the browser.
Chrome OS is essentially the Chrome browser with a specialized Linux distribution underneath designed to get out of the way with the browser as the main UI paradigm. Many of the features of Chrome browser are were developed
Invitation to the Chrome-lined Cloud (Score:2)
Yeah, seriously Google? Where's MY invite? I want to be there so I can then get paid to blog about it!
Keeping it straight-ish (Score:5, Interesting)
Or was the likely convergence prediction premature?
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The differences in TFA seem largely arbitrary to me.
1) Android is for touch devices (despite the fact it works great with a keyboard, as demonstrated on netbooks), while ChromeOS will have no touch-screen capabilities (despite the fact there are no obstacles to implementing the relatively light-weight Android solution in ChromeOS as an option).
2) ChromeOS won't have compatibility with Linux apps (despite being Linux based and running on the same hardware) or Android apps (despite them being Java-on-Linux ba
The simpler OS on the more powerful hardware? (Score:3)
He claims that Android is for the smaller formats, and Chrome OS for the netbooks. It's funny if this is Google's goal, since the netbooks use to have much more flexibility in offering better hardware and performance, not being tied to a small form factor, and then give it the OS that offer only a subset of Android's functionality. Android offers a full OS running native applications, along with the Chrone web browser -- where the latter is the *only* thing Chrome OS offers.
I always found this aspect of Google's new operating systems weird. If Google were serious about Chrome OS, shouldn't that one have been aimed for the phones and tablets, with Android for the netbooks? Chrome OS is at least the OS that does less, and is more simple to the end user. It can basically only run a web browser (and all underlying stuff that's necessary to run that web browser compiled for Linux, of course).
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Chrome OS is Google's enterprise push on top of Apps. it need a lot of bandwidth. the mobile world hasn't gotten there yet. expect Android to become more like Chrome OS over time.
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If Google is going this route, they may be a bit presumptuous. Bandwidth is not going to increase with cellphones that much, and where you see it increase, large fees are tacked on (like VZW's LTE offering, or Sprint's WiMax.)
If Google can get providers to get 20Mbps LTE Advanced without charging $10 a gig, this might be a workable solution. However, as of now where the going rate for bandwidth is $10 a gig, it just won't fly presently.
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There are large swathes of the world where mobile data is much cheaper/free.
For one thing, Google's headquarters is not located in such a country. For another, such countries also have far fewer people per spoken language, which affects the time=money needed to prepare localized versions of user interface, and far fewer people per jurisdiction, which affects the time=money needed to vet applications against national laws.
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With their NaCl project, it could include entire native binaries, "installed" just by going to a web page, cached via HTML5 methods, sandboxed for security. Such a model wouldn't be very "web" of them; but it would mean that ChromeOS can do basically everything except run legacy applications not designed for it.
Re:The simpler OS on the more powerful hardware? (Score:4, Interesting)
If Google were serious about Chrome OS, shouldn't that one have been aimed for the phones and tablets, with Android for the netbooks? Chrome OS is at least the OS that does less, and is more simple to the end user. It can basically only run a web browser (and all underlying stuff that's necessary to run that web browser compiled for Linux, of course).
I think Google was somewhat surprised by the success of Android. As so often Google threw lots of things at the wall and then looked what kept sticking. Android stuck extremely good and then Google looked at it and noticed they can't profit that much from it.
Google is all about the Web and Chrome OS is nothing than a web browser. Use Chrome and you use the web and nothing else, which means you're bound to get served ads by Google and that's what Google wants. Use Android with lots of apps and the browser being just one app among others is not helping Google much.
Google has never been really excited about Android being used on tablets, they actually tried very hard to convince everyone to use it only on smartphones. And now they still try to get Chrome OS at least onto netbooks.
I don't think anyone will care much about what Google wants. Smartphone, tablet, netbook... running nothing but webapps sucks on all of them.
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That is why they bought Admob and then pursued Rovio to make Angry Birds free on Android with those ads. So now, Android is profitable.
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Google developed Native Client fo
Just putting my 2 cents in (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO the only way Chrome OS is interesting is if it is released on netbooks that cost 150-200$ less than their Windows counterparts. Sure, it won't do everything a full OS does, but at a $250-300 price point, it would be very compelling for the same reasons netbooks were popular in the first place. If Chrome OS can bring netbooks back to their bare bones, dirt cheap, linux roots, they may have a hit on their hands. If they offer this for about the same price as a Win7 netbook, they shouldn't even bother.
Anyone else have any ideas how this could be an interesting/successful product?
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Re:Just putting my 2 cents in (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't Windows XP licensed for netbooks at around $40? I doubt you will see much of a price decrease.
There could be other factors like reduced need for local storage, (maybe) running better on a lower spec. processor and with less memory.
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CACHE MANIFEST and localStorage (Score:3)
There could be other factors like reduced need for local storage
Chrome OS runs web applications, and web applications that can work offline must make heavy use of CACHE MANIFEST [w3.org] and localStorage [w3.org], both of which can be big if someone tries to implement photo management (from your Android-powered camera?) as an offline web app.
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reduced need for local storage is counterbalanced by the increased need for a permanent connection, which in the end is a lot more expensive and cumbersome than local storage.
i doubt running apps as javascript within a browser requires less power than stand-alone, compiled apps.
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Besides, since when did the average PC buyer, comparing two systems, take into account the OS performance and determine that a lower spec machine with a faster OS would be a net gain? For most users it's all about how many RAMs or gigglehurtz they get for their buck.
Very interesting point. Say ChromeOS did perform better on a lower spec machine then people appreciating it would be the most technical users, who would understand this and the least technical who wouldn't bother about GBs and GHz but just saw that it worked reasonably quickly.
... it can't be as good as the 2GB 2.2Ghz Intel machine" and reject it. The question is where does the average user come - in the bottom or middle g
The "middle" users would say "This has only 1GB of memory and a 1Ghz arm processor
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reduced need for local storage is counterbalanced by the increased need for a permanent connection, which in the end is a lot more expensive and cumbersome than local storage.
That is not the usagecase for Chrome OS. Although Chrome OS will allow you to work off-line, it expects you to do that only as a last resort. If you don't plan to spend the vast majority of your time on-line, then don't use Chrome OS.
If you are buying internet just for your Chrome OS computer, it will be more expensive than local storage, but more likely you already have the connection, so it is not an additional cost of the OS.
Mobile broadband vs. relying on Wi-Fi (Score:2)
If you are buying internet just for your Chrome OS computer, it will be more expensive than local storage, but more likely you already have the connection
In some parts of the world, it's common to have a Wi-Fi connection inside some buildings (which have a public hotspot) but not others (which lack one), or to have a Wi-Fi connection inside buildings but nothing while riding public transit. In the United States, Google's home country, mobile phone service plans allowing tethering are uncommon, so one must purchase separate data plans for a phone and a PC.
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Isn't Windows XP licensed for netbooks at around $40? I doubt you will see much of a price decrease.
I think they could save a lot on hardware, for example local storage needs would be next to nil, so a 8gb flash drive could replace the hard drive. The system overhead should be much lower, so you could use a cheaper processor. All that would take some load off the battery, so you could trim that as well. In the end you could have a system which is just as fast as windows, but significantly cheaper.
But all that is speculation, there is a lot that remains to be seen, Chrome OS may have severe issues, especia
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A large amount of the savings should come from hardware.
Windows must use and X86 while Chrome can run on ARM or maybe even MIPS
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ChromeOS is compelling because netbooks are slow running native applications. With the underpowered CPU and lack of memory, it makes a lot more sense to run web apps. Just boot up to a quick and efficient browser and you have everything you need.
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Aiming for the mobile-broadband demographic? (Score:2)
And yes really how often are you without internet.
There's a reason that Android Market officially works on smartphones and not PDAs or "smart MP3 players". Most of the popular phones can buy apps, but Archos 5 and Archos 43, which are the closest thing to an iPod touch, don't come with the Market app. Though Chrome supports HTML5's proposed offline app mechanisms (CACHE MANIFEST and localStorage), I imagine that Google is trying to target people who pay $$ per month for 3G cellular data. These people are more likely to use other Google services and look at
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And yes really how often are you without internet.
Never.
No, seriously, absolutely fucking never. Disregarding the possibility of mobile connections, which would also give me Internet as a passenger on a road trip, I currently have Internet at every building on campus, including large swaths of central campus. Also pretty much every coffee shop or restaurant, even the cheap pizza joints have wifi now. Two of the last three times I've flown, there's been in-flight wifi.
And that's disregarding mobile connections.
A better question might be, when are you withou
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It's odd, I used to do much of what people do on their netbooks in 1997 with a Pentium 100 with 16MB of ram.....
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To me, ARM powered netbooks with some of those fancy higher-end ARM chips, a decent mobile GPU and maybe a hardware chip to decode video is what Chrome OS should be aiming for. If ARM is good enough for web apps on an iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, Android handset etc, it should be good enough for the same web apps on Chrome OS (and such a setup should get better battery life than any of the x86 ATOM Win7 laptops out there)
Warranty of OS compatibility (Score:2)
Granted the windows 7 it came with ran like a dog, but it runs Ubuntu quite nicely.
Was your $250 laptop warranted to work with a Free operating system? Most laptops I've seen are only warranted to work with the operating system that came on them. You don't want to buy a laptop and install a Free operating system only to find that the video is unaccelerated, the sound doesn't work, the webcam doesn't work, the Wi-Fi doesn't work, etc.
Why would I pay more, for a less functional device?
Because more vs. less functionality is in the eye of the beholder, and functionalities that may not be important to one customer, such as compatibility with f
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The obvious other way it could be an interesting/successful product is by doing what a large number of users want more cleanly and with less distractions than Windows. Which, after all, is largely the point of using the browser as the central UI paradigm.
Its the same model that made the iPod a success -- and, for that matter, did the same for Google's clean-interface, good-results search engine in the era of search engines trying to be portals and everything else at the same time.
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From the concept reading/videos that I have looked at, it seems that Google is looking to boot this thing straight from ROM. They state they are bypassing a lot of standard startup procedures and skipping any boot-loader; instead they are going to a kernel load and letting their OS do all that lifting (not because they can do it better than the hardware manufactures, but because, I would think, they don't actually want all that hardware there that you could do something with that isn't on the cloud). This m
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He did us quotes around "desktop" just 3 sentences earlier:
Google also took its time getting even a Chrome beta out the door. Now that Chrome OS is about to be unveiled, we know that it is going to be Google’s “desktop” operating system, while Android is for smart phones and tablets.
And this is progress? (Score:3)
In a perfect world with infinite bandwidth, and no lag, maybe it's doable.
What would make me truly respect them is if they came up with something like BeOS, or QNX (Haiku), but which also had a metadata/database file system [skytopia.com] where everything is searched for, and folders become less of an issue (or not needed at all). Encouraging programs to be more self-contained would also be a step forwards too.
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See, I don't think that's entirely impossible. Google for Domains already provides Docs, and while that's no competitor to Microsoft Office yet, the key word here is "yet". For basic tasks, it's a perfectly competent office suite, it works perfectly well over a plain ADSL connection today and it's included automatically with Google for Domains. Which costs rather less per user than Exchange.
There is a reason Microsoft are terrified of Google, a reason why Steve Ballmer throws chairs. It has nothing to d
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I dread the amount of lag if everything ran off the internet. Programs such as Photoshop or Visual Studio would download every time instead of run immediately?
That's now how it works. [google.com]
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they intend to abolish the desktop
FINALLY!!!! Linux on the desktop once the desktop is abolished. Oh, the irony.
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+11 Funny!
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I agree with you that this makes no sense, which makes me hope that the "nothing stored on the local computer" is a bit of an exaggeration. *Some* of the time, you are going to be without an internet connection and you may still want to work on that document or read/write e-mail.
We're a long way from people asking "Off-line? What does that mean?"
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I think its a bit of a simplification. From everything else I've seen from them on Chrome OS, I think its perhaps more accurate to say that the real intent is nothing stored directly on the local filesystem by applications (other than basic OS components.) Things might be cached in the browser cache, stored using HTML5 local storage APIs, and so forth, and by those mean
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Can't watch the video ATM, but unless they have radically changed their goals I don't think the point is to completely replace the desktop. Programs such as Photoshop and Visual Studio are not run by the masses and I don't believe they intend to kill those off. Most people use their computer for email, web browsing, web video, and maybe some light document editing. All of these are completely possible with just a web browser and google apps. This type of usage on netbooks and nettops are the target market f
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Paint Shop Pro was 2MB in size, it would take a few seconds to download at today's speeds. Not everything has to be as bloated as Photoshop or Visual Studio.
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I'm sorry but Haiku and QNX have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Haiku is a clean room implementation of BeOS. Two entirely different things. The only thing Haiku and QNX have in common is that they are both alternative Operating Systems.
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Unless this enables a 99$ netbook why bother? (Score:2)
ChromeOS will be DOA (Score:1)
Of *course* ChromeOS will run Android apps (Score:2)
Cameras, Printers, flash drives, etc? (Score:2)
Anyone know if this thing is going to have even limited support for USB peripherals/drives? With the browser being the OS (at least it sounds like), would you even be able to load up photos from a camera hooked up via a USB cable, to view on the (relatively) larger screen of the netbook? Will you be able to do any sort of printing to a USB or network printer? Will it support reading and writing files from/to USB flash drives, SD cards (i.e. the types used in most cameras and phones)? I wouldn't expect to ru