Note: You can create this Google-acct from any PC-browser, or from any Android-based tablet or smartphone, etc. (To illustrate, I'll describe this procedure based on a recent 'new-user' account that I added on my Android -based Nexus-9 tablet.)
So let's say you presently have some username, as your email-acct name at Yahoo.com (and maybe you don't already have nor want to switch to using a Google "GMail" acct). But you DO want for Google to create you an 'account' so that their various services can be associated with you so that you can later access them and store items such as photos or documents on your Chome-bookmarks, etc. All this stuff will be kept in what is commonly referred to as your 'cloud account'.
(1) First, Google will ask you for a username, and has you specify its pwd. Once established, you can then access your already-existing Yahoo email acct, but using their GMail app's interface. (2) Later in their dialog, they'll also create you an actual GMail user-named account, so they have a generic 'place' to store all your cloud-synced data, including photos, and ability to access their other services (e.g. Google Docs and Chrome-bookmarks, yada yada.) The point here is: You do not HAVE TO USE the GMail acct or ever tell anyone of its existence. (3) Note: For a 'secure' / forgotten pwd authentication, you choose either your cellphone, or you can have it sent to an email acct. (4) Note that the credit-card info they ask for is OPTIONAL.Once you 'unlock' (Login-equiv), touch and hold to setup a background (e.g. the Egyption pyramid is nice). Grab a widget or two and drop onto one of your home-screen panels.
To create that special 'Google Now' home-screen panel (it will be at far-left end of your series of home-screen panels), go to Play-Store, and install the free "Google Now" app (with a blue circle around a white "G"). You explicitly launch it just once to initially create that panel. Then you tailor various categories of info that can display on that page, such as your fav stock quotes, and news headlines, and a locality-based weather summary, etc...the possibilities seem endless.
Read about it here.Also, I'd recommend that you find and install the "Battery Widget Reborn" app. It which has NUMEROUS battery-related features, including 'nite-mode' (shuts off wifi during the wee-hours) and a 'torch' (flash-light), etc. And, those features are accessible from a PERMANENT notification entry, so they're shown as an notification-item in Android's standard upper-left notification swipe-down.
I could continue recommending all sorts of useful free apps. I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding plenty of them. As the media-world likes to say "Ok, there's an app for that." Ok, I'll mention one last app that I now consider almost a "must-have"...one called "Screebl". What it does is to use the device's orientation-sensor, so that as long as your device is being handled and not lying horizontally flat, it will NOT invoke the screen-dimmer and then blank-out the screen in the usual fashion, in an effort to save battery power. The idea for this, is so that when you prop up your device, using its case or cover or even just lean it up against some object, it will then assume you want it to stay lit up. This is perfect to when you want 'hands-free' use reading a recipe as you prepare a meal./p>
Of course, Chrome OS's centerpiece is Google's Chrome-browser, which has clearly outpaced Firefox and IE (Internet Explorer) and Opera as the browser-of-choice on many Windows-based PCs. The assertion underlying Chrome OS is that there is NOW a web-based application (aka a web-app...a browser-based appliction) for any and every task that people use a computer to accomplish. [ I was initially VERY skeptical that I could find a web-based app to replace every task that I was presently doing on my Windows PC. But, I was DELIGHTED to learn that even client tasks such as video/audio conversion (transcoding) and and torrenting (the preferred downloading method for video and audio) have been implemented as web-apps. ]
Google has constructed a website called the "Chrome Web Store", where one can acquire various apps, that run in the Chrome brower. (There are also simple 'themes' that control the background of the browser and/or the desktop within Chrome-OS itself.) These apps include categories of all sorts, such as 'business' and 'games', etc. Most are free, but a relative few cost a few dollars. (That said, all the apps I have had need for have existed and been free apps. Only one app, namely "JSTorrent" is available in two flavors...one is free (and avail on GitHub as a zipfile) and requires some simple installation steps, while the other variant is avail at the Chrome Web Store, costs about $3.00 dollars, and is self-installing/configuring .).
Let's briefly explain the browser terms 'plugins' and 'extensions'. All browsers allow application 'plugins' to be installed within them. An 'extension' is a newer variant of a plugiin that programmers develop specifically targeting Google's Chrome-browser. (Such an extension can run only in Chrome, but not in any of the other common browsers.)
One way to examine or manipulate any browser's Plugins is just to enter "about:plugins" into the address-bar. Note that the resulting output contains a 'Details' clickable, to filter-out/filter-in detailed info regarding the various installed browser plugins. Similarly, to examine or manipulate Chrome's installed extensions. you can enter "about:extensions" into the address-bar. Note that you can individually disable/enable any plugin or extension via a clickable, and that you can completely un-install it if desired, by clicking on its associated 'trash-can' icon.
An alternative method: to manage the browser's Extensions, is to go to "[mgmt-icon]->Tools->Extensions". The mgmt-icon is the one with 3 horiz-lines, at the upper-right of Chrome's window (sometimes referred to as a 'hamburger' icon).
The way the Chrome-browser 'caches' is different from many other browsers. This is especially noticeable, when certain sites (e.g. forums) are not correctly encoding their HTML-markup, which is not an uncommon occurrence. Or, maybe you just updated some content out on a webserver, but Chrome-browser isn't seeing those updates.
The fix/workaround is to learn a quick-shortcut to its 'cache manipulation' options.
The shortcut sequence is: CNTRL-SHIFT-DEL (hold down the first two, and then press DELETE-key.Google's various netbook offerings, which of course come with Chrome OS installed on them, are referred to as "ChromeBooks". In 2015, I purchased an Acer 'ChromeBook 15', for about $280 US-dollars. It has a 15-inch screen, 4-GB of ram, and 32-GB SSD (storage). Thus, Chrome-OS ChromeBooks are typically about HALF the price of an equivalent Window-PC.
Google encourages website developers to utilize their Google-Maps functionality by publishing their API and making it VERY EASY (and free!) for others to build upon all their great work. The two pages at top of this section use the latitude/longitude (GPS) support, which is crucial when marking locations that are not street-address-based.
Another very common requirement is for a website to show a map of their facility, or location of an upcoming meeting, or whatever. And, then they typically try to include some STATIC driving directions or a static map. That old technique is now obsolete...it is now MUCH simpler to go to Google's 'maps.google.com' website, enter the street-address of your facility (or locate your point with a latitude/longitude), and then just click on 'Link to this page' and they will GENERATE both a URL for that exact location and the needed HTML-code that you can embed in your website-page that produces a DYNAMIC map of your location.
Below is an example of that html-web-code, for street-address '1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC' (the US whitehouse).
I chose the 'small'est map (which user can dynamically make larger, if desired, by clicking the 'View Larger Map' choice just below the map):
The neat part is that the ultimate user can then produce their OWN customized driving directions to or from this chosen location, or find nearby pizza, etc, etc. Very cool and trivial for any web-master to implement (i.e. by just copying the HTML tags here).
I just RECENTLY learned about 'Google Places' and how it seemlessly integrates into Google Maps and even into Google Search! It's quite cool.
Most ALL of us can (and probably should) take the time to put our very basic data for our chosen careers into a capsulized form, and then create a business entry into Google Places, tied to our home-address (or our business-address). I have done exactly that, for my semi-retirement businesses of computer repair and website construction. And, since my businesses aren't tied to a an actual single job-site located elsewhere, I've tied that new Google Places entry to my HOME-ADDRESS.
BACKGROUND-INFO: This part includes some speculation on my part, as to how all the most basic-level businesses got onto Google Maps in the first place. I'm coming to believe (educated-guess?) that Google must have done some automated 'data-mining' to put the lowest-level little square-markers onto the street-addresses for businesses in some areas of the the U.S. (and elsewhere in the World, too, probably.). Consider that all they'd need would be to have access to the list-of-addresses! To distinguish a business-address from a residential-address, they could simple then do a 'reverse-lookup' into a business-white-pages listing/database.
HOW-TO: It's easy to do! One way is to navigate to Google Maps and look for a clickable thing that
says "Put your business on Google Maps:.
Another approach is to explicitly create yourself a Google-Account (your identity for all-things 'Google'). So, if you don't
already have one (e.g. for Google-mail or whatever), you can just navigate to Google (Accounts) here:
In either method, it's interesting to understand that they will first 'validate' you, which they do just to insure that you represent (own/control)
the phone# (and other info you are submitting), just so that you won't try to mess up someone ELSE's business listing, etc.
One method they use to do that (the method I chose) is to have their automated phone-robot call your business phone# and dictate a 5-digit 'pin#',
which you are then asked for when you submit your data thru the Google Places website.
Once you've done that and waited for a day for Google Maps to get your business data, then you can do a search on Google Maps, and you
should see your business shown on the map.
As an example of the final result (i.e. to look at mine), try this: Navigate to Google Maps website, enter this address
[' University Park, FL '] which should place your 'context' (location/postion) in the 'vicinity' (i.e. within a half-mile)
of my home address, and then play around by doing a search for 'computer repair'. If that came out right, you should then
see at least a round pink marker entry for 'WaterHawk Computer Repair' on the map where my house is. [Other times, I get the
more-complete 'pink balloon' marker, with an "A" or "B", etc, inside it. Not sure yet what factors determine what shows up.]
Another (temporary) thing: 'Google Maps' screen in browser currently DISABLES by default, a big button labeled "What's Around Here", but you can enable it by clicking the little green 'flask-icon', with RED lettering that says 'New', at upper right-side.
There is a whole new 'Google-Places-API' that they document here:
I've recently become interested Ajax-pages re-built to be "iGoogle Gadgets". So, be SURE to get familiar with iGoogle and its 'gadgets', and try using iGoogle as your home-page, which of course, you can then populate with your favorite 'gadgets', tailored to your specific needs. Nifty!
Gadgets are quite easy to build, if you are familiar with building a basic webpage, using HTML (HTML5 is cool), CSS, Javascript, and XML. (Basically, that is what 'AJAX' is all about. A Gadget just goes one last step forward, and encapsulates all those various pieces into a single XML-container for deployment.]
[See their 'test-your-gadget' link on the right, if you build one...that gadget-tool REALLY helps me to coding mine correctly!][Gadgets also allow use of Java and Python, instead of only javascript. Note that there is a NEWER java-client-lib that is needed if you also want Android-compatibility (I think). Here's a link to that:]