Acer Chromia 700 Chromebook Starts Shipping

Initially expected to ship in mid-June, the WiFi-only version of Acer's Chromia 700 Chromebook is now finally available for purchase from select US retailers, pricing being set at $349, just as Acer has promised.

Acer is one of the two hardware partners that Google has chosen for the consumer launch of its Chrome OS operating system, and the Chromia 700 Chromebook was originally expected to arrive on June 15.

It soon became apparent, however, that Acer is having troubles in keeping up with its release schedule, which forced the Taiwanese company to push back the availability of the netbook to mid-July.

The Acer Chromia 700 is built around a 11.6-inch LED backlit screen that has a native resolution of 1366x768 pixels and is powered by an Intel Atom N570 processor.

This packs two computing cores running at 1.66GHz as well as a GMA 3150 integrated graphics core.

The Intel chip is paired together with 2GB of DDR3 system memory and the netbook also sports a 16GB solid state drive.

Other features include a 1.3MP HD webcam, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, a pair of USB 2.0 ports, one HDMI video output, and a 6-cell Li-ion battery pack able to provide 6 hours of continuous operation.

The WiFi-only version of the Chromia 700 Chromebook is available right now from Amazon and its retail price is set at $349.00. The 3G version of the netbook is expected to arrive later this summer $429.99, but no firm shipping data has been set at this time.

Google's other Chrome OS launch partner, Samsung, has started selling its Series 5 Chromebook on June 15. The Samsung netbook features pretty much the same specifications as the Acer unit, but it comes with a 12.1-inch matte display which supports a 1280x800 resolution. (via Notebook News)