Chinese whispers hint at early Chrome OS release

Google has remained enigmatically silent on internet rumours that the company’s Chrome OS could imminently arrive on some Chinese netbooks.

Instead Mountain View has reaffirmed that it’s on course to shove its new operating system out the door in the second half of next year.

“We announced that we'd be releasing the code in Q4 of this year and that the first netbooks running Chrome OS would be available in the second half of 2010,” a Google spokesman told The Register.

Meanwhile, Chinese website Shanzi.com is citing sources that claim some Lemote devices powered by Loongson CPU could soon be on sale with Google’s Chrome OS pre-installed as early as the end of October.

Google didn’t outright deny that claim but instead simply told us it doesn’t “comment on rumour or speculation”.

Google confirmed in July - when it first announced plans to build its own open source operating system - that it had signed up Acer, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Toshiba as its hardware partners.

Seeing as Google has already pushed out code to OEM partners, it may be reasonable to speculate that some hardware manufacturers are more willing than others to try out untested technology on its kit.

But as it’s merely a rumour, we at Vulture Central take the speculation with a family-sized pinch of salt. ®