Kogan Beats Samsung and Acer With World's First Chrome OS Laptop

cylonlover writes "Australian manufacturer Kogan will ship the world's first notebook featuring Google's open source Chrome OS from June 7. The release date for the 11.6'' Agora Chromium Laptop means that Kogan has pipped Samsung and Acer by just over a week in the race to be the first company to offer a Chromium OS notebook."

Comments

Chrome OS will fail.

[Lemmy Caution]

I say this as someone who was on the CR-48 pilot. The reason is not Chrome OS itself: the problem is that cloud-only is impossible for anything serious. One hits a wall in which no web-app suffices to do what needs be done.

For me, the Google eco-system's permanent beta cripples it and ensures the longevity of its competitors. The issues for me? After all these years, there is no bibliography / citation management system for Google Docs that works in the cloud (at least nothing that could work with a Chromebook.) And, you can't define styles in Google docs. The absence of offline mode - the deprecation of Gears without implementing a replacement - was another disaster.

Google's strategy has been to create disruptive technologies, but that's no longer enough. A good anecdote to describe Google's failure to fully deliver is what happened to the founders of Foursquare: after having designed Dodgeball and getting acquired by Google, the were left high-and-dry, their technology more or lest left on a shelf. They got fed up and left, and created what should have been a strong Google product. Google tried to play catch up with Latitude, but it flopped, like all the other half-assed, unfinished products that wind up in its portfolio.

There is a lot Google does right, but it simply can't deliver a full working environment. Fundamental problems in its product management culture will have to be resolved before anything on the scale of a Chrome OS will work.

Re:Chrome OS will fail.

[devent]

"There is a lot Google does right, but it simply can't deliver a full working environment. Fundamental problems in its product management culture will have to be resolved before anything on the scale of a Chrome OS will work."

Not only that but the whole "cloud" concept for private people doesn't make any sense at all. Storage and CPU power is so cheap, but compared to that the connection to the internet is very expensive and very unreliable. Even in high-tech countries like the US, or Germany, the latency is very height, like 60ms up to 100ms (compare that with the computer latency with is around 1ms), and it's expensive compared to 0$ for the local hard disk. If we are compare G3/G4/UMTS then it's much more expensive, slow, and unreliable.

The whole concept of cloud had made sense back in the days when storage and CPU power was so expensive that only the universities could afford it. So you had at home a relative cheap box to connect to the university computer to run your heavy computations.

For private consumers it just a big disadvantage. For firms it would make some more sense to outsource your I.T. But you should know if it makes sense to make your whole business depended on some second firm in the cloud.

For Google of course it makes perfect sense to push for the cloud. They make their money of advertising and the people's data. So of course they want you to be connected 24/7 to their services and store your data on their servers. But it's just stupid for anyone who do real work with their computer. But for facebook/hulu/youtube people , maybe it's ok if the laptop is so much cheaper. But then Google don't need to invest in the cloud-software stuff like Google Docs.

Re:Beat?

[AHuxley]

ChromeOS and Chrome and Andriod are here for two reasons:
1) Prevent "ad lockout" ie ready for flash/cookie/tracking/database/web 2.0+ads every start up.
2) Upgrade client side revenue stream technology (allowing a better profiting from web applications)