Do you want a Chrome OS notebook?

5/11/2011 1:40 PM EDT

It's official. Acer and Samsung are making Chromebooks, available in June for $349 and up to consumers. Businesses get a h/w and s/w package for $28 and schools get them for $20 a month

5/11/2011 2:21 PM EDT

What will be the processor - ARM or can it be any? Will it have touch screen and 3G?

5/11/2011 2:22 PM EDT

Can't say I'm very interested. The cloud is great for many things, but being completely dependent on the cloud for everything means that when you lose connectivity, you've got nothing at all.

5/12/2011 12:38 AM EDT

Not yet compelling, because I believe I can duplicate many of the essential features that this package offers, using other providers, for the same or less.

5/12/2011 1:50 AM EDT

Let's face it, as a user group, we engineers tend to the nerdy side (whether it's digital or analog). Speaking personally, I'm 20% insulted, 20% patronized and 60% nonplussed when someone comes along to 'simplify' such a product for me. The result being that they remove things I need or want, and replace them with nothing but marketing and a pretty logo. My 3-year old Lenovo X61s restores in a few seconds, gives me a real transatlantic flight's worth of working battery life, and still runs stuff I wrote on an original IBM PCXT courtesy of the rocky but traceable Windows family tree. It backs up to 'the cloud' and runs Chrome as a browser. The only thing I want back is my Acer tablet's Wacom stylus for freehand circuit diagram stuff, and I'm totally sorted.

5/21/2011 11:01 AM EDT

I've had my share of experience with cloud services. They are neither fast enough nor reliable enough for business use, and I'm not sure I want to trust my corporate data with a company or companies that might be bought out by some competition next week. Also some of the big guys offshore services from time to time because it saves them a buck and then they find out that the laws in those countries are adequate to protect customer information. If the banks can be bitten by this, then no one can convince me I won't. NO THANKS, I'll manage my own data.

5/25/2011 4:36 AM EDT

I live in a place where 3G mobile internet is atleast reasonably good. Speedtest.net shows around 2-3Mbps speed on my phone on average. But still, very frequently my connection gets disconnected when I travel in trains or when I am in some malls. So I dont see a fully cloud based system happening very fast.

6/9/2011 4:30 PM EDT

For that price, I can get a dinky notebook with actual storage. And wifi. Why pay Google for something I don't need?
And all the other comments above. Trust the Cloud with my data? Many corporations are betting on this business case - until they are sued for malfeasance for off-shoring data, when security and compliance people tell them NO.

6/9/2011 4:52 PM EDT

Not likely. Anyway, how can any file system really be tamper-proof?? That sounds like an advertising gimmick!