14 DAY TRIAL // An interesting piece of news has been making the rounds lately, saying that Acer is planning to launch Google Chrome OS devices in a couple of weeks, at the 2010 Computex Taipei show, running from June 1 to June 5. The report on Venture Beat is a little light on details, but would seem to indicate that netbooks or other devices running Chrome OS will launch in less than three weeks. There’s just one problem with that, it’s not going to happen, not unless you change the definition of ‘launch’ a bit.
The report doesn’t say what devices Acer has been cooking, but most people believe that the company will have some new netbooks to show off, perhaps even a tablet. Another idea that seems to be popular is that the company will reveal some ARM-based devices, either nebooks or tablets, as opposed to the regular x86, Atom-based devices that most manufacturers, including Acer, build on the netbook market.
But that doesn’t mean Chrome OS is coming. While the company may unveil devices running current Chrome OS builds, the operating system is far from ready to hit the market. Even the latest builds of the open-source Chromium OS, on which Chrome OS will be built, are very buggy and missing a lot of features. Chrome OS is not even alpha quality at this point.
What’s more, Google’s initial plans were to launch Chrome OS in time for the 2010 holiday season and there’s little to indicate that that’s changed somehow. And since anyone can track the development process, thanks to it being an open-source project, it’s easy to see that Chrome OS is in no way ahead of schedule.
However, things are moving pretty fast and, since Chrome OS is basically just Google Chrome built on top of the Linux kernel with little additional libraries and no other native applications, as far as the user is concerned, it has been fairly usable ever since it was first unveiled. It’s quite possible that it is stable enough to run a demo at a trade show. So Acer devices running Chrome OS are very likely to be present at the Taipei trade show. But those devices won’t probably hit the market at least until late autumn 2010.