Acer to ship more than 1m Chrome netbooks
E-book readers and Apple-inspired tablets too
Acer has narrowed its Chrome OS netbook release window from H2 2010 to the third quarter. It’s also preparing to launch an e-book reader and – guess what – a tablet too.
The e-book reader’s due to be announced in the June, the company has told Bloomberg, and feature a 6in monochrome screen – an E Ink job, we’d guess.
It’ll be aimed initially at Europe and Asia Pacific, the better to allow Acer to work up content deals with local publishers while the likes of Amazon and – we’d say – Apple focus on the US market. Jim Wong, head of Acer’s IT products division, said the company is talking to periodical publishers.
Wong didn’t say whether Acer’s Chrome-based netbook will be a single-OS device, but he certainly indicated it will appear in dual-boot machines alongside Windows. Acer re-released its Aspire One D250 netbook – reviewed here – in October 2009 with Android on board as a fast-boot secondary OS, and it will presumably do the same with Chrome.
Single-boot Chrome machines remain a possibility. Wong said the Google OS was being adopted, in part, so there is “a change to the Microsoft-Intel environment”. Possibly that means the Chrome-only netbooks will be based on ARM processor technology.
Maybe, but Wong said only ten per cent of Acer’s netbooks will feature Chrome after its appearance in Q3, though he later said the company will ship 12-15m netbooks in 2010, but only a million or so will incorporate Chrome – rather less than ten per cent, we note.
Lastly, we have the tablet, a device Wong admitted will be inspired by whatever Apple may come up with on Wednesday this week. ®
COMMENTS
Acer keeping their options open and so they should
Not a surprising announcement. Google say that Chrome OS will not be ready until November and from what I seen there is still a bit of work to do.
Where the hardware is locked down then OEMs can load Chrome OS with confidence.
I can get it to boot from a USB in 11 seconds so SSDs should be no issue. Waiting for a full OS to load on a train is painful regardless of flavour (corporate PC even worse). If all you want to do is find an address, calender or simply to answer the attachment ridden email that appeared on the blackberry, a dual boot fast access option to the internet is a treasure.
For those that can't wait to justify a dual boot netbook/laptop I suggest USB boot options. Thanks to all those involved in BrowserLinux with both the Firefox and Chrome versions. Absolutely excellent. Puppy takes 50 seconds but at least it allows me to overcome the hardware issues.
Can only get better so do we need Chrome OS?
All we want is a browser that runs everything such as iPlayer without a glitch.
The Google OS APPS menu will be helpful to those that use these applications but isn't Google breaking its own philosophy here, should this not be on the web and authenticate across to other apps?. So are they being helpful or have they a vested interest just like the rest of them in pointing to their own apps first from all future Chrome loaded devices. All you really need is a start web page in Chrome with your own links. I feel a letter to the EU may be necessary.
Fork it
Just put a fork in it. Don't like ChromeOS? Fork it, make it better. Or just build your own from scratch in Arch/Debian/Crux/Puppy/LowMemoryDistroOfChoice
