Chrome Getting More Tablety by the Day

Google hasn’t yet officialy announced plans to release a Chrome OS-based tablet, but it’s clearly accelerating its efforts to adapt Chrome to that form factor.

Indeed, a close look at the operating system’s source code reveals a number of recent tweaks that show Google programmers optimizing the browser-based OS for use with tablets. Among them, a new user agent string that includes the term “CrOS Touch,” which, as the change log explains, will “let Web sites that are already customizing for tablet experiences easily adapt to support tablet ChromeOS devices.”

And, of course, the dead giveaway: A virtual keyboard.

Google insists this is simply “early open-source work for the tablet form factor” and says it has nothing new to announce at this time. But then what else would it say when its other tablet OS–the Honeycomb version of Android–is only just now arriving on the market?