Google pushes out cheaper Chromebooks

Google has announced a new Samsung Chromebook, which is cheaper, and powered by an ARM processor rather than an Intel Atom CPU.

By moving to a cheaper ARM chip, the company can lower the price point – as well as slimming down the display a bit, too, ensuring a $250 price tag in the US, £229 over this side of the pond (not much lower, sadly).

At that level, however, the Chromebook may be able to compete with rivals, pitched in with the cheaper tablets – and certainly well below hybrid tablet/laptop devices such as Microsoft’s surface, which launches next week (starting from £399, and that’s without the hybrid keyboard bit – £479 with that included).

The new Samsung Chromebook comes with an 11.6 inch display, with a resolution of 1366 x 768, and it’s powered by a Samsung Exynos 5 dual-core CPU.

It has a 2GB of RAM, a VGA camera, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, a USB 3.0 port, USB 2.0 and HDMI ports. The machine boasts 6 hours of battery life, and a small 16GB SSD. However, the Chromebook also comes with 100GB of free storage on Google Drive (in other words, in the cloud).

It weighs only just over 1kg, and is 20mm thick, so pretty portable.

This new model with its truly budget price could prove more tempting, but so far, the idea of the Chromebook – which boots to a browser, rather than a full OS you can install programs on – has been something of a hard sell for Google. Certainly much more so than the Nexus 7 tablet.