Jolicloud 1.1 arrives with battery life boost

Jolicloud has released version 1.1 of its cloud-based netbook operating system.

In a blog post on Tuesday, the Jolicloud team said the new version would provide performance improvements and better battery life, and marked a shift from Jolicloud being a netbook OS to being "about recycling computers".

"With what we are releasing today, Jolicloud will bring all its users one step ahead of what Google, Apple and Microsoft are announcing," the post read. "When everybody talks about HTML5 as the future, we deliver it today, now and for everyone. But here is the trick, you should not be forced to buy an expensive device to benefit of these technologies. With Jolicloud, you just need to recycle any computer."

New features in Jolicloud 1.1 include the ability to customise the desktop background, more easily access desktop settings, and add any local application to the dashboard from a Jolicloud device.

Jolicloud is a portable OS, in that it synchronises all the user's apps to any installation that the user signs into. It treats web-based apps, Linux apps and — via Wine — Windows apps in the same way, adding a similar icon for each to its HTML5 launcher. Similarly to Google's Chrome OS, which is expected to be fully revealed later on Tuesday, its primary focus is on web-based apps.

At the time of writing, the Jolicloud 1.1 ISO and Windows installer were due to be made available for download "later today". "If you are running Jolicloud 1.0, we will start updating users in a few days," the post noted.