Santa fail: No Chrome OS netbook this year

Computer manufacturers won’t release Chrome OS-based netbooks until 2011, according to a senior veep at Acer.

The company’s Jim Wong told reporters earlier this week that the consumer release of Google’s oxymoronic browser-based operating system won’t land until next year.

Engadget reported that Google has its own plans to bring out something in December, which chimes with the ad broker’s recent declaration that it will “have more details to share later this year."

But the cloudy platform won’t arrive on Google’s hardware partner’s notebooks until 2011, Wong reportedly said.

According to Engadget, Google has in effect pushed back offerings from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Asus, Acer and Lenovo while it tinkers with its own-branded netbook for the savvy developer community.

But customers who had put a Chrome OS netbook on their Christmas wish list look set to be disappointed this holiday season.

Google announced it was working on its own operating system in July 2009 and said at the time that "the first netbooks running Chrome OS would be available in the second half of 2010". ®