Yesterday, Jolicloud released the much anticipated final version of Jolicloud OS 1.0, a web-based operating system built with netbooks in mind. The new release has been rebuilt from the ground up using Google’s Chromium OS codebase in place of Mozilla’s Prism backend. We got a chance to test the latest version of Jolicloud on Dell Mini 9 netbook, and were thoroughly impressed with what the OS has to offer. Here’s what we found.

The biggest change in the OS is, of course, that it is built completely on HTML 5 thanks to the borrowed code from the open-source Chromium OS. It’s great to see a small company like Jolicloud complete such a polished and feature-filled product before a tech giant like Google, without having the same resources. Still, Jolicloud isn’t aiming to compete with Google, but rather provide a useful piece of software for those who are unhappy running the resource intensive Windows on their netbooks, or a Linux variant which has been built with netbook use as an afterthought.

Installation

There are various ways to install Jolicloud onto your netbook. If you’re on a netbook which runs Windows XP or Windows 7, the easiest way is to use Jolicloud Express.

Choosing this option will install Jolicloud onto your existing Windows partition so you’ll need to select how much space to allot for the OS. Once the installation is complete, you’ll be asked to restart your system, where you’ll be greeted by the boot loader with the option to choose either Windows or Jolicloud as your OS of choice. You will have to create a new Jolicloud account to keep your system up to date, but the process takes just a couple of minutes.

The other option is recommended for more advanced users, as it requires a bit more knowledge of what you’re doing, and involves burning an ISO file to disc and installing the OS from there. This is also the recommended option for netbooks not running Windows. We won’t discuss the particularities of installation as you can get a full installation guide from Jolicloud’s site, but this is the option we chose to take having installed many Linux distros in the past.

It’s All About The Apps

While Jolicloud may bill itself as a cloud-based operating system, that is not to say that you can’t install regular desktop applications. The OS’ app store boasts over 700 different applications which can be easily installed with just a few clicks. It’s really nice to have all the apps collected in one place, especially for those of us who have become spoiled by such great app store implementations on our mobile devices thanks to the iTunes Store and the Android Market.

Jolicloud’s concept is called App Center and works much in the same way but with the added benefits of some fantastic social features. You’ll get the usual topics such as Featured Apps and Popular Apps sections. The latter is updated constantly as other Jolicloud users install new applications. Additionally, users can share installed apps with friends. All this is held together by what Jolicloud calls the Social Stream, a centralized place for app recommendations and application updates. This is by far the best implementation of an app store that we’ve seen in any platform and we can only hope that other OS developers implement it into their systems. We already know that Google plans to add it to Chrome OS, but we’d like to see Microsoft or Apple take a stab at doing something similar.

Life In The Cloud

One of the greatest benefits of using Jolicloud is that since it is a cloud-based operating system, all your files live in a remote server. While there may be some disadvantages to this, it works great on systems with limited resources and disk space. Additionally, it provides the added security of keeping all files backed up in a remote location, so that should your machine crash, your files will be kept safe. Because of the nature of the OS, you also get the added benefit of being able to access your files from any machine running Jolicloud by simply logging into your account. There are no apps, settings, or preferences to copy over or bring with you on a thumb drive since everything lives on the cloud, automatically synchronized for easy access.

Final Impressions

If you own a netbook there really is no better operating system than Jolicloud right now. While other netbook-specific operating systems such as Ubuntu Netbook Edition may offer similar experiences with the same degree of polish, they fail to offer the ease of use and sense of security as Jolicloud. Netbooks are, after all, meant to be mobile devices, and most other operating systems available simply offer the desktop experience translated to a smaller screen. If you want a truly mobile and modern operating, give Jolicloud a try.