It seems that Google may be gearing up for a public launch of Chrome OS tomorrow at Google I/O. If so, this would mean the end of a six-month delay for the OS, which would be much welcomed. I, for one, am pretty excited about this launch, since I’ve been wanting to get my hands on Chrome OS for quite a while, but I’ve never felt comfortable running anything from the Chromium repository. Whether I try to install Chrome OS on my MacBook Pro or get a dedicated device will mainly depend on whether the Samsung event also slated for tomorrow evening is to announce a Chrome OS netbook.
I do hope that both of these rumors are true and that by Wednesday night we’ll know all the details about Chrome OS and the first publicly available Chrome OS netbook. The biggest factor then in determining how well it’ll sell is price. If Samsung builds a true netbook, I don’t see it being very expensive, or at least I would hope it isn’t. If it’s not in the $2-300 price range I imagine that a lot of the general public would feel a little uneasy about dropping that much money for such a lightweight device. Considering that netbooks are basically portable web-browsers and the idea is not to have much actually happening on the device itself (as far as processing and local storage), there isn’t a whole lot to raise the price for and it’ll be hard to justify spending more than $300 on one, even for me and I’m a pretty big geek.
I guess we’ll just have to wait for the truth in a few days.