Google Launches Chrome OS On CR-48 Netbooks

Google is offering Chrome OS on a basic test netbook, the CR-48, while full commercial products from Acer and Samsung won’t reach consumers till the second half of 2011.

The announcement, in San Francisco on 7 December  fulfilled Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s admission last month that Chrome OS machines were months from launch, as well as hints that a demonstration machine. It also included the launch of a Chrome Web Store, with apps for the Chrome OS and browser.

CR-48 – a bare bones test machine

The CR-48, an unbranded Chrome OS-based netbook will be available to qualified users, developers, schools and businesses who want to test it and provide Google feedback on how the platform can be improved.

Google Chrome OS is an ambitious move to upend the traditional PC model cultivated by Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Mac computers for the last few decades.

Chrome OS is a thin-client operating system which runs all applications inside Google’s Chrome browser, which has more than 120 million users around the world.

While traditional PC and Mac machines typically take minutes to boot up, Chrome OS machines boot in seconds, as Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management, demonstrated on stage. Pichai also showed  Chrome OS netbooks can go into standby mode and recover state within seconds instead of minutes.

Pichai and his team showed off prototypes of Chrome OS netbooks, but they were not built by Samsung or Acer who will launch their devices in mid-2011, six to eight months late than originally intended.

When Pichai released Chrome OS to developers in November 2009, he had said that polished machines would be ready for consumers by the 2010 holidays.