Chromebooks limited by their proximity to the web

Google Chromebooks are great tools, but until recently they required the internet. Without the Internet they are pretty frustrating. Google was determined to change that.

Now, there are a slew of new tools for Chromebooks that allow offline access to the Google suite of office technology--from Gmail to Google Docs. Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app that provides access to your email while offline. This HTML5-based application is very much a spinoff of the tablet version. Google Calendar and Google Docs allow you to quickly transition from online to offline access. You can access your content, but you cannot yet edit documents in the offline version.