In about three weeks, we can stop talking about how Chromebooks-light-weight laptops running Google’s Chrome OS-might, or might not, work in the real world because we’ll get our hands on the first two models: the Samsung Series 5 and the Acer Wi-Fi Chromebook. Here’s what we know now about them.
First things first. The Chromebooks you’re going to see in mid-June are not going to be those dreadful beta CR-48 netbooks with some lipstick on. These are real netbook-sized laptops from Acer and Samsung: companies that know a thing or two about design.
Next, none of these laptops are powerhouses. For processors they use the 1.66GHz duel-core Intel Atom Processor N570 and they come with 2-gigabytes of RAM. On the other hand, they’re not trying to run Windows 7 or even Ubuntu Unity. They’re running Chrome OS, which is little more than the latest Chrome Web browser with a bare-bones Linux foundation. You don’t need much to run that.