At $250, New Chromebook Means Competition For Tablets, Netbooks, Ultrabooks

[wraggster]

Google's new ARM-powered Chromebook (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/10/18/2048243/arm-based-chromebooks-ready-to-battle-windows-8-tablets) isn't a lot of things: it isn't a full-fledged laptop, it's not a tablet (doesn't even have a touch screen); and by design it's not very good as a stand-alone device. Eric Lai at ZDNet, though, thinks Chromebooks are (with the price drop that accompanies the newest version) a good fit for business customers (http://www.zdnet.com/the-google-chromebook-suddenly-is-an-enterprise-contender-7000006018/), at least "for white-collar employees and other workers who rarely stray away from their corporate campus and its Wi-Fi network." Lai lists some interesting large-scale rollouts with Chromebooks, including 19,000 of them in a South Carolina school district. Schools probably especially like the control that ChromeOS means for the laptops they administer. For those who'd like to have a more conventional but still lightweight ARM laptop, I wonder how quickly the ARM variant of Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/arm) will land on the new version. (Looks like I'm not the only one to leap to that thought (http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.com/).)

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/10/21/2344235/at-250-new-chromebook-means-competition-for-tablets-netbooks-ultrabooks