Enterprise Mobility: Samsung Series 5 Chromebook Teardown Reveals Spartan, Efficient Design

Talk of Google Chromebooks rose to a fever pitch in May following their introduction at Google I/O, with Samsung and Acer planning to sell notebooks based on the Chrome operating system starting June 15 through Amazon.com and Best Buy online. Chromebooks, which boot up in 8 seconds simply by lifting the lid, include a file system that supports documents and a media player for video and music. It also provides integration with Picasa to let users manage their photos on Chrome computers. Recently iFixit tore down the Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook, which eWEEK saw first hand, to discover what was under the hood of these speedy, Web surfing devices. The machine, which weighs 3.3 pounds, is powered by a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N570 processor. True to Google's word, the Series 5 has very little storage—all of 16GB internal SSD and 2GB of DDR3 RAM, non-upgradeable. The 12.1 LED-backlit LCD display is also a nice touch. This device, which has one SD card reader and two USB ports, connects to the Internet via 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Verizon 3G WWAN. Take a walk through this eWEEK slide show to see what iFixit found inside the first Samsung Chromebook, which is considerably more polished than the Cr-48 test models Google pumped out last winter. That's as it should be if Google wants to further its cloud computing vision via Chrome OS computers and Web applications.