Earlier this week, we saw a video go up on YouTube showing off the alleged Chromebook Pixel. While many people, including myself, thought the video was just a concept or mock-up, it was quickly removed from YouTube, causing speculation that the Chromebook Pixel is in fact a real product.
On Saturday, Francois Beaufort, a well known Chrome OS developer, posted a snippet of Chrome OS documentation that essentially confirms the existence of the Chromebook Pixel. Beaufort has correctly leaked Chrome OS information before, including the upcoming notification center.
The documentation details the “lightbar”, which should this be correct, is four-color indicator that will be used to display remaining battery life to users. The code also confirms the back-lit keyboard shown in the video.
At Startup or wake from sleep, Google colors cycle in.
While running, > 25% power level in the battery:
All blue, in a breathing effect (cycle up and down 30%).
While running, <= 25% power level in battery: Same as above, but with red Shutting down, or going into sleep: Cycle out the Google colors (Note: the effect is only visible for S0->S3, because shutting down kills power to the lightbar before we can react).
While sleeping:
Similar to now, but only using Blue and red for battery indication as above.
While this does not entirely confirm the Chromebook Pixel, it does give us all quite a bit more hope. It could be that a user noticed the documentation before the video and then produced the mock-up, but at least the video source is using real information, directly from Google.
Chromebooks took the world by storm in late 2012 when Samsung and Acer released their budget laptops running the ultra-simple operating system. The $250 Samsung Chromebook and $199 Acer Chromebook were both very common gifts this holiday season, assuming you could find the Samsung model in stock anywhere. The Chromebook Pixel is expected to be the Nexus device of Chromebooks and was supposedly designed entirely by Google. It reportedly features a whopping 4 million pixels and a 2560 x 1700 display resolution. Whether not the Pixel will compete with the pricing of other Chromebooks (or if it even exists) will remain to be seen.
Source: Google+