14 DAY TRIAL // Although just about everyone's been eagerly waiting for the end of 2010 in order to see the first netbooks running the Chrome OS arrive on the market, it seems that they'll be sort of disappointed, since chances of actually seeings these devices arrive in stores have just hit rock bottom, according to none other than Google's own CEO, Eric Schmidt.
So, within in an interview with eWeek, Mr. Schmidt revealed the fact that no hardware running the Google Chrome OS would be shipping over the course of 2010, practically delaying everything (both the product and the OS launches) for 2011.
Unfortunately, no solid time-frame for the launch of the Chrome OS netbooks has been provided, either, the company's rep saying just that they'll be coming at some point over the “next few months”, which might actually mean just about anything, from a CES 2011 launch to a push-back all the way to Q2. As some of you might recall, while Google also apparently plans to release a self-branded netbook, it will mostly rely on partners including Acer, ASUS, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Toshiba for the bulk of Chrome OS netbook sales. The delay of the Chrome OS hardware and operating system leaves even more room for the deployment of even more tablets, whose level of popularity is rising rapidly and that, for some people, are actually rendering netbooks useless and obsolete. Luckily, though, beside the iPad and a few (and far between) Windows 7 models, most of the new tablets arriving on the market run Google's own Android operating system, which means that the search engine giant's quite covered and thus not really under pressure to release a whole new OS, that might actually go directly against one of the company's own creations, cannibalizing it much in the same way as tablets are doing to netbooks right now.