Day two of Google’s I/O conference was all about Chrome and the big announcement was the pricing and availability of the Chromebook netbook featuring Google’s new Chrome OS. It’s essentially a very streamlined and efficient netbook and will be available worldwide on June 15th, with models produced by Samsung and Acer and ranging from $349-$499.
Google hopes to differentiate Chromebooks by offering an 8 second boot time, full cloud syncing of documents/apps/settings, and built in security features so users never have to worry about viruses or malware. Essentially, the Chromebook is just a web browser, but with the robustness of web-apps these days, that means that you can get a lot done with them.
All the 3G models of Chromebook come with 100MB of data a month for two years after purchase through Verizon. The other data plans are below:
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While it’s a little disappointing that there’s no unlimited monthly data plan, the data plans are comparable to the plans for 3G iPads. Depending on your usage habits, you may not even need to pay for a monthly data plan.
Before the announcement this morning, the internet was abuzz with Google’s $20 a month “student package” subscription plan for Chromebooks. It offers both hardware and software support as part of the subscription plan and will be available to businesses for $28 as well.
Unfortunately, Google requires a three-year subscription contract committment if you want to take advantage of this offer, which makes it much less compelling of a deal. At $20 a month, three years would cost you $720, almost double the price of the Chromebook if you buy it outright. At $28 a month, you’re looking at $1008. Now, you’re supposedly getting tech support with this, but it’s going to be hard to persuade consumers that the premium is worth it.
MG Siegler from TechCrunch had an interesting take on Chrome head Sundar Pichai’s diction during the product announcement:
But then he followed that up by once again noting that “you can take any Chromebook, flip a switch, and install whatever you want.” Again, he used the keyword “jailbreak”.
Also worth noting, Chromebooks are not SIM-locked. This means you can swap carrier SIMs in and out to use whatever carrier you wish. This is particularly useful in places like Europe, Pichai noted.
That’s one way to get hobbyists and hackers who don’t like Apple’s “walled garden” approach to hardware and software to listen. But will the general populace care about such customizability?
It’s an interesting product market Google is going for here, the “not-a-tablet-yet-not-a-laptop-and-not-quite-netbook” niche. What do you think? Is the Chromebook on your “want’ list?
