UK Netbook Review

Google’s Chrome OS is scheduled to officially launch at the end of this year, but according to Digitimes, we could be seeing netbooks with Google Chrome much earlier than that. They report that Acer is planning to launch devices running Google’s Chrome OS in the middle of 2010. Sound familiar? Yup, we heard the same news late last year, and also earlier this year with Samsung’s plans to launch a Google Chrome OS netbook later this year.

Google’s Chrome OS is due out late this year, but the open source project, called Chromium is there for anyone to work on and that means we get development all year long. Anyone with enough skill can modify & work on the operating system should they wish. One such man, Hexxeh, has been providing popular builds of Chromium OS and his latest release,called Flow, supports Nvidia ION support, improves battery life, supports additional hardware support, browser fixes and introduces an automatic update system. Pretty impressive eh? We though so. Check out the link below to give it a whirl.

Samsung let slip during the launch of Samsung’s newest Pinetrail netbooks in Australia that they’ll be releasing a netbook with Google Chrome OS later this year. They say it will be similar to the current Samsung N210, so perhaps the same chassis with a 10.1 inch screen. It’ll come with 2GB RAM, at least 64GB of storage, built-in 3G and a 12 hour battery. No word on processor but we’re thinking perhaps Samsung’s new Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (1.5GHz).

Engadget reprorts that Acer, the netbook manfucaturing giant, will release a netbook running Google’s upcoming, and eagerly awaited Chrome OS, late this year. No comment was given on whether it will use an Intel or RM hardware, or possibly both in a dual-boot configuration. Any guesses?

Dell has really stood out as being the first manufacturer to really stand behind Chrome OS. A few days ago they provided a Chromium (the Chrome OS open source project) build for the Dell Mini 10v, and now they’ve added support for the Dell Mini 9 and Latitude 2100 netbooks. The Dell engineer has Chromium up and running on a spinning hard drives of the latitude 2100 and the 10v, despite news early on that Chrome OS was to be SSD only.