Google and Intel are holding their little press conference in San Francisco right now, and they have just announced that they are releasing a whole lineup of Chromebooks from their hardware partners this year. That includes Chromebooks from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG and Toshiba. You’ll notice that Samsung is missing from that list. That is mainly due to the Korean manufacturer looking to use their own ARM-based Exynos processors in their own Chromebooks.
The new Intel Bay Trail Chromebooks are touting 11 hours of battery life, which is a significant upgrade over the Haswell processors we saw last year. Most of the Haswell-powered Chromebooks were rated at 7-8 hours of battery life, even though I frequently got higher than that while I was reviewing those like the Acer C720 and C720P. But being rated at 11 hours is insane. It means you can literally make it through an entire day of use. Which is great, especially for those that are working out of a coffee shop, or something like that. It’s especially good for college students, for those long study sessions.
Now we have just about every PC manufacturer on-board with Chromebooks and Chrome OS. Which isn’t surprising since the PC industry has stalled pretty heavily lately. And the Chrome OS industry is really lighting up. As Google mentioned during the press conference today, the 6 top-rated laptops on Amazon are all Chromebooks. And 7 of the top 20 best selling laptops are all Chromebooks. That’s definitely great for Google, and more importantly these PC OEMs, which are struggling with traditional PC sales as of late.
Intel has also shown off the performance of the Bay Trail processors compared to the ARM-based processors, and there’s a pretty big difference. Which is great to see actually. Especially for Intel. How many of you are looking to grab a new Chromebook this year?