Dell Launching Chromebook 11 in January

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JD88

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Looks like an excellent product. That means just about every major manufacturer has released or has plans to release a Chromebook in the near future.
 

overclockingrocks

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Chromebook is an amazing concept and I'm really considering buying one. However I wonder if they will go the way of the netbook ie be popular for a year or two and then everyone goes hey we can do this stuff on a tablet or hey I'm paying $250-300 for a tiny underpowered laptop when I could have a full sized laptop with more power for the same money. With that said would this stop me since I already own a powerful laptop and a desktop and a tablet? NOPE! I like innovative products and the Chromebook as a concept is no exception. For the masses though I can see this whole thing fizzled out by 2015
 

JD88

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I would recommend buying one and using it as much as possible for a week or two. Then you'll know why Chromebooks are here to stay. Everyone is skeptical until they try it.

You don't have to buy anything underpowered. The Acer C720 and HP 14 both run Haswell processors and SSDs which makes Chrome OS fly. Faster than any Windows PC in the price range. Hell, the Acer is $200 with those specs and gets 9 hour battery life.

Fast, simple, easy to use, powerful, no virus, no malware, no bloatware, no annoying updates, no reboots, no popups, and no extra cost whatsoever. You're at the desktop in 8 seconds from a cold boot. Great for just about any kind of media consumption and it's also a very good productivity tool with a full size keyboard and access to Google Docs, Microsoft's Office web apps, Pixlr photo editor (80% of Photoshop for free) and many other cool and powerful cloud apps.

I
 

Fredrik Aldhagen

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A tablet is pretty much a toy. There's no problem writing longer documents on a chromebook, I can't say the same for a tablet.
A $300 laptop won't have an SSD, will have lousy battery life, is bulkier than a chromebook, and while it will do things the chromebook won't, it won't do it particularly well.
 

schultzter

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Considering the Android X86 project has Android running on laptops/computers I wonder how long it will be before Google drops ChromeOS in favour of Android? The foundations are pretty much the same: connected device with most of it's storage in the cloud. It wouldn't take much for Google let Chrome apps run "native" on Android to ease the transition (like they do on laptop/desktops). Then you've got three choices to develop for (Android, Native Android, or HTML5/Chrome) and one platform to support (Android).

Any tablet with an external keyboard is pretty much a netbook with a touch screen. So you really can't distinguish based on the form factor.
 

ZolaIII

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Comparing this to Acer C720 Chromebook i think it's worth of that price only if they did include a serious storage solution like 1TB hybrid HDD bat i don't think so. It has a little better display larger battery & 2x ram (4 GB). Price tag is 50% up from Acer C720 Chromebook (200$ vs. 300$).? With a price tag around 250$ & serious storage solutions laptops like this have sense for students regardless of OS with they are coming with (free DOS, Linux ChromeOS) because as a students i would probably install Ubuntu, ChromeOS is ok for light use (Web, social ...).
 

Fredrik Aldhagen

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I keep reading this all the time... ChromeOS has an entirely different design philosophy from Android. Android is a general purpose OS optimized for touch screens, meanwhile ChromeOS is is streamlined to do only one thing, run the Chrome browser (which is the "full" version, with extensions and flash support, unlike the more limited Android version) while keeping the startup time to a minimum.



Putting a HDD in a chromebook doesn't make much sense, it's slower and draws more power, and the use cases for ChromeOS doesn't require a large amount of storage anyway.
 

ZolaIII

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@ Frederick Aldhagen
They are actually based (ChromeOS & Android) on Linux & they are not even close in usability when compared to a full Linux distributions. The processor is power in off to spin any OS bat i whose only considering free ones.
I em from those that like to carry arond large mmc collections & i did mention a hybrid drive like cost effective solution that still have solid speed. 16 Gb of integrated Nand storage it to little even for the phone this days & again large Nand storage is out of question because of price.
 

Fredrik Aldhagen

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Yes I'm well aware that both ChromeOS and Android are based on the Linux kernel, but that only shows how flexible Linux is, it doesn't change the fact that they are designed for different usages. However keep in mind these chromebooks are designed for ChromeOS, not as cheap Linux laptops (even though you can use them as such)

16GB is plenty for ChromeOS. If you want to play your music you can just plug in your mp3 player and it will see it as an external drive (unless it's an iPod)
 

assasin32

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Netbooks was a good concept but they lacked in performance and MS made sure it had sub-par specs with their lisencing agreements. Beyond that manufactureres would throw in bloatware which would hinder the performance of the already measly hardware and shoot up the boot time on the slow laptop hard drives. Realistically they were just painful to use with how slow they were for the average consumer unless they knew how to disable/delete the bloatware and fine tune everything to get decent performance.

Chromebooks on the other hand you can't install bloatware, no security software to worry about, updates happen automatically to everyone. SSD is in almost every one, combined with a stripped down OS you get good performance out of some pretty measly hardware and excellent performance out of anything halfway decent. It's built on the "KISS" philosophy (keep it short and simple) and it just freaking works and you don't have to do anything. I own the Samsung Chromebook and it just freaking works, never had to do any real maintenance to it besides restart it occasionally to let it update, but I could do that whenever I feel like it and the machine won't force me or nag me about it.

So realistically I don't see Chromebooks going the way of the netbook anytime soon. It's pretty much the ideal laptop you want if all you want is the internet and not much else. And that need fits the mass majority of the consumers.Don't believe me the Samsung Chromebook is still #1 best selling laptop on Amazon, and has been so for over a year now.

As for people who compare Chromebooks to tablets I bet have never used a Chromebook and have never actually tried to do any actual work on a tablet. Doing some actual work on a tablet is quite an painful experience I wouldn't wish the fate of typing up a paper or even class notes on anyone (I am in college the people who try to use tablets for that stop after a week or two). So I don't see tablets taking over Chromebooks either. Even those Tablets with keyboards as they are quite a bit more pricey, and at that price point you should be comparing it to ultrabooks.
 
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