Downloader: Acer launching Chrome OS devices in two weeks? Hold your horses...

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Acer launching Chrome OS devices in two weeks? Hold your horses...

VentureBeat has a rather interesting exclusive this evening: Acer is said to be launching Chrome OS devices in two weeks at Computex 2010 in Taipei....But don't get too excited just yet.

I'm not sure if you've built the Chromium OS source code lately, but it's far from complete (and most of you probably wouldn't expect it to be). The user interface still needs quite a bit of polish, the window manager behaves strangely from time to time, there's that whole cloud printing thing going on, and plugging in USB flash drives can cause Hindenburg-esque crashes. Not to mention the fact that we haven't even seen a developer preview build from Google yet...

My guess is that this is more of an unveiling of hardware -- ARM-based, probably, though VentureBeat doesn't know whether we'll see netbooks, tablets, or both. Then again, there's also a decent chance Acer might just cram a dual-boot Chrome OS option on an Atom-powered netbook running Windows as our old pal Brad Linder points out.

Acer's devices likely won't be available until much closer to the end of 2010, if what Google told us when they first open sourced Chromium is true. Google stated that it would be a year until release when they made that announcement in mid-November 2009.

Chrome OS devices in time for Christmas? That sounds reasonable to me.

Acer launching models in two weeks? Not so much.