Google is delaying the launch of Chrome OS on netbooks to consumers until mid-2011, when Samsung and Acer will offer machines. For now, Google is offering Cr-48, a pilot device.
Computers running Google's Chrome Operating system won't ship to consumers
until the second half of 2011, with netbooks slated to come from Samsung and
Acer at that time.
Google is instead making unbranded, Chrome OS-based netbooks available to
qualified users, developers, schools and businesses that want to test it and
provide Google feedback on how the platform can be improved.
Google officials made the announcements, along with the launch of the Chrome
Web Store, at an event in San Francisco
Dec. 7. The news is consistent with Google CEO
Eric Schmidt's
assertion last month that Chrome OS machines were months from
launch.
Google Chrome OS is the search engine's ambitious move to upend the
traditional PC model cultivated by Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac computers
for the last few decades.
Chrome OS is the base platform for the Chrome Web browser, which has more
than 120 million users around the world.
Google hopes these users will run Web applications from its new Web store,
which includes 500 applications from the likes of Amazon, Sports Illustrated
and the New York Times at the
launch today.
While traditional PC and Mac machines typically take minutes to boot up,
Chrome OS machines boot in seconds, as Sundar Pichai, vice president of product
management, demonstrated on stage Dec. 7. Pichai also showed it can also put
Chrome OS netbooks in standby mode and recover state within seconds instead of
minutes.
While Pichai and his team did show off prototypes of Chrome OS netbooks,
they were not built by Samsung or Acer, which will determine pricing for their
machines closer to launch next year.
Pichai said Chrome OS netbooks will appear from those computer makers in
mid-2011, or 6 to 8 months later than originally intended. Pichai
said at the Chrome OS introduction event in November 2009 that
polished machines would be ready for the 2010 holidays.
Email
Print
