Yesterday (June 15th, 2011) was the official launch of the Samsung Chromebook; while the Acer model is delayed for sometime later this month. Those of us who attended Google IO back in May are waiting for our “redemption coupon” in order to get our hands on these devices. (Googleio on twitter has made a tweet in regards to our chromebooks).

The Samsung “Series 5” Chromebook is offered in either a black or white option priced at $429(WiFi) and $499(3G). The Acer “AC700” Chromebook is priced at $349(WiFi) and $429(3G) available only in black.

While it’s tough to say how these will fare on the market, I think they’re covering the middle ground between a full featured notebook and a tablet, heavily pushing their cloud based apps.

During I/O, we were given a pretty nice demonstration of chrome OS during the day 2 keynote. I was actually quite impressed as my initial expectations were pretty low. They have hit the head on the nail with how the majority of people are doing most of their computing interactions via a web browser. And they’ve demonstrated some key “offline” capabilities of the device. (Though the full experience is of course being connected to the internet).

It’ll be interesting to see the future of chrome OS and the chromebooks, (and tablets too for that matter) especially considering there’s no single device that can handle all your computing needs anymore. — I imagine a day in the future where a smart phone is powerful enough to run full PC type computing/programs and simply dock into various stations to use full KVM.

The chromebook will undoubtedly be a winner for those that leverage social media and spend their entire day in a browser – using google docs, blogging and what not. Though as of now it’s just shy of taking a chunk out of those of us that need slightly more capabilities, but with a bunch of tech savvy developers getting their hands on these, hopefully we’ll see some new innovate apps instead of people rooting the chromebooks into more of a typical notebook.

Redeeming Your Chromebook!

On June 24th, 2011, we received an email from Google with details as follows:

Subject: Google I/O 2011 Chromebook Distribution Details

Dear <techblog>,

Thanks for coming out to Google I/O this year.  We’re excited to pass along details about the Chromebook gift for I/O attendees.

Samsung is pleased to be able to provide each of you with an Arctic White Samsung Chromebook Series 5.

Please log into the Google I/O website by Friday, July 8, 2011 with the confirmation number below and your Google I/O password to receive details on how to receive your Chromebook.

Confirmation Number: xxxxxx

The Samsung and Chrome teams

Upon going to the site and using our confirmation number we were told they don’t ship the Chromebook to our country. (Oh No!) Luckily we have offices in California and after paying a couple hundred dollars in shipping/duty and all that other garbage, I’ll finally have my “free” chromebook… in about 6-10 weeks. Amazon ran out of stock pretty fast, probably within an hour or two, so there’s a 4 week delay in just getting it shipped. It was 100% free to ship to the USA, however the minimum and slowest shipping still puts the cost close to $200 when shipping up to north. (Including duty/border fees)

It’s hard to complain about a product you’re essentially getting for free, we were lucky to have a location to ship to – Sorry to all those out there that won’t get their free chromebook. The deadline is fast approaching so you better make some friends out of country soon!

First Impressions

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