14 DAY TRIAL // Last month, we came upon information that Hewlett-Packard was preparing a Chromebook, and now we have the official confirmation: HP has issued a press release about the Pavilion 14.
Chromebooks are oddballs on the laptop market because of their incredibly low on-board storage, lower than on most tablets really.
While regular laptops (notebooks, ultrabooks and netbooks) have one or more hundred gigabytes of free space, Chromebooks have much less.
The HP Pavilion 14 itself only has a 16 GB solid-state drive, whose whole purpose is to hold the Chrome operating system and ensure fast boot-up and run times.
Everything else, including the programs and data storage, is done in the Cloud. That is to say, on Google's servers, over the web.
HP Pavilion 14 has a 14-inch panel, which is about 2 inches wider (diagonally) than the few other Chromebooks on the market.
"Google's Chrome OS is showing great appeal to a growing customer base," said Kevin Frost, vice president and general manager, consumer PCs, printing and personal systems, HP.
"With HP's Chromebook, customers can get the best of the Google experience on a full-sized laptop -- all backed up by our service and brand."
Owners of the Google Chromebook will be able to use Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and Google+ Hangouts (multi-person video chats) and apps from the Chrome Web Store.
An Intel Celeron CPU with Intel HD integrated graphics runs the whole device, while security is ensured by constant OS updates and a built-in Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
Other specs include HDMI, USB 2.0, Ethernet and a mixed headphone/microphone jack.
US customers can order the Chromebook for $329.99 / 245.12-329.99 Euro at HPDirect.com. 100 GB of free cloud storage are included (for two years). Go here for more information or just to place an order or two.