$249 + 20% UK VAT ($50) = $299. So the price in the UK can be around £189 or £199 to be approximately fair. It usually is fair in Europe, if not at MSRP on the release date, then soon after, they do want to leave some nice big margins to encourage resellers to make huge amounts of free promotion and advertising for the device.

When the gristle-brains in the UK recognize that $249 = £156 (maybe £159), not £229 = $373, I’ll consider buying.

Until then, they can keep them, ‘cos my 5yr old Asus 701SD with Puppy Linux installed, is far more useful.

However, a larger screen would be handy.

Please check back in the days and weeks ahead. Hopefully one of the manufacturers says yes!

I’ll try to get some of the cool ARM Powered laptops on the members store. 13.3″ and 10.1″ definitely look cool, let’s see which may or may not also be able to run Chrome OS or Chromium OS and Ubuntu.

You can host your calendar, docs and contacts on any web app you want. You do not have to use Google services on your Chromebook, I prefer to because I think Google online services are the best, but you can use any online service you want, simply type in the URL and bookmark it.

I think you can install Ubuntu on it: https://plus.google.com/109993695638569781190/posts/b2fazijJppZ

Android is likely more for touch devices, and I think a Google engineer already posted about how to install Ubuntu on this device. You can “easily” run Ubuntu from the SD card, but I guess it’d be best to run both from built-in flash, looking forward to info on how to do that.

1) Chromebooks have about 200 million applications that run on them, they are called websites. New such advanced websites use even advanced native code, web gl in them, they can do anything that old windows/mac/linux apps could do, but now being cloud apps, they can have much better features in them. Video editing? try collaborative video editing with rendering with the power of 1000 servers. Photo editing? try collaborative photo editing. Whole new world opens up.

2) HTML5 means apps work offline. For example in the airplane, you can edit documents in Google Docs, you can read and write emails in Gmail, and they all synchronize once you are back online. All web apps can work offline, that is part of the HTML5 spec. That not only means offline support, that means all web apps can launch instantly when you click on the icon even when you have a slow internet connection.

3 million Pixel Qi laptops have been sold worldwide, mostly in the OLPC project. Of course, 300 million Pixel Qi screens hopefully by next year, including more 7″, 11.6″, 13.3″ is better.

i also would like to see if this model could be offered for members as well. definitely would like to try getting either ubuntu or chromeos on that model. also a paying member!

html 5 allow off line

16Gig it’s not so bad, i installed a full complete linux distribution… total 4 gig

Not so crazy, check facebook…. 1 billions people account….

Samsung Exynos 5 with their 5250 based on Cortex A15 in this Chromebook will of course with this cheap price be a winner.

But I think Cartox A15 based SoC from Allwinner,Telechips,Rockchip,HiSilicon and all other ARM-developers from China will make this kind of ultra-Ultrabooks even cheaper next few years.

Just think HP+Hynix Memristor and other types of ReRAM memories will come in massproduction in end of 2013-2014.

This ReRAM memories will have same writing speed as todays RAM-memories and can cope 1 000 000 writing cycles in comparison to todays Nand Flash memories which can only cope
100 000 writing cycles.

1) They don’t have applications.

2) They need to be always connected.

No more points are needed : they are useless paperweights for almost everybody.

I am a paying member and appreciate your work on the blog.

That should be

“acessed by secure wifi”

Remote storage does not necessarily mean storage in the cloud. I work in a college and can remotely access the college network, on which my professional data is stored. The college owns several thousand PCs, and replacement costs make it difficult to upgrade; quite a lot of our computers are over 6 years old and use Pentium 4 processors without hyperthreading. They are painfully slow, but other upgrades take priority. Over the last couple of years, we have changed most of our student access to laptops to free up deskspace, and allow more flexibility in classrooms. All data is stored on the college network, accessed by secure network. The internal disk is never used. If Chrome OS software is able to read MS Office files, the college would be foolish not to consider replacing old hardware with Chromebooks, which have a Total Cost of Ownership around 30% of the TCO for a PC.

Chrome OS is fine and all, but a computer which turns into a brick when there’s no Internet is still too big a liability. 16 GB of disk and only a handful of apps available off-line is ridiculous.

Also, I know the cloud is all the rage, but if I don’t have my data locally, and backed up, then my data is neither guaranteed to be available nor guaranteed to be safe. That’s not acceptable.

There is a strong demand for an alternative to Windows, and Linux keep fumbling the ball. My bet is more on retrofitting good keyboard+mouse handling and multitasking into Android than on Chrome.