At a December 7, 2010 press briefing, Google announced the Cr-48 netbook, a piece of reference hardware created to test the Chrome OS operating system. Google will give away a limited number of the netbooks as a part of its pilot testing program. The Cr-48 is intended for testing only, and will not be sold to the general public. Google also addressed complaints that the operating system offers little functionality when the host device is not connected to the Internet. The company demonstrated an offline version of Google Docs running on Chrome OS and announced a 3G plan that would give Chrome OS users 100MB of free data each month, with additional paid plans available from Verizon.
About 60,000 Cr-48s were distributed to testers and reviewers in early December 2010. I got mine on the 14'th of December.
The Cr-48 is a 12-inch notebook that has a footprint of 9.8" by 6.1" and is 0.9" thick. It's fairly portable in its weight too at 3.8 lbs.
Even before powering up the notebook, we knew that there was an Intel processor inside the Cr-48, which was made clear thanks to the "If you cracked this open, you'd find Intel" card inside the box. We appreciate that it was a card, rather than a sticker on the palm rest.
The Intel CPU inside is the Atom N455, which is a single core solution, on Intel's CG82NM10 PCH. It's believed that the market versions from Acer and Samsung will use dual-core Atom N550. For memory and storage there's a 2GB stick of Hynix RAM inside, plus a 16GB SanDisk SSD. Its Verizon 3G chip is the Novatel Gobi2000 PCI Express Mini Card, the Wi-Fi is handled by the AzureWave Atheros 9280 802.11 a/b/g/n part, and there's also Bluetooth thanks to the Atheros AR5BBU12 with V2.1 EDR.
Stay tuned for more about the software and in-depth experiences with Chrome OS Notebook.
I do admit information has been cited from Tom's hardware, as well as Wikipedia. This blog is intended as a informative, compiled blog that takes information from websites, as well as my own experiences and presents them all dressed up and neat.
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