Samsung’s ARM-powered (WiFi) Chromebook briefly appeared on Google’s official Play store yesterday before selling out after only a few hours.
The $250 netbook is now officially out of stock, with a “notify me” option replacing the short-lived “add to cart” button.
Of course, the Chromebook can still be pre-ordered from a number of other retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, TigerDirect and NewEgg. Although an exact shipping date has yet to be nailed down, a number of reports indicate the device will likely hit the streets by the end of October.
And while the new Chromebook still hasn’t shipped, a developer by the name of Olof Johansson has already managed to load up Ubuntu on the $249 laptop – and we all know it is only a matter of time before an unofficial Android port goes live on the device.
Clearly, there is a lot of pent up demand for the device and not just because of its cloud-centric OS. Rather, the Samsung Chromebook is one of the first real mobile implementations of ARM’s long-awaited Cortex-A15 processor in the form of Samsung’s Exynos 5 dual-core chip.
Additional Chromebook specs include an 11.6 inch display, 802.11n/WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, a USB 3.0 port, a USB 2.0 port, HDMI output, a VGA camera, 16GB of storage, 2GB of RAM, 10 second boot time, instant resume from sleep and approximately 6.5 hours of battery life.
Chrome OS can best be described as a Linux-based operating system designed to work exclusively with web applications and Mountain View’s cloud-based Google Drive. The operating system was announced on July 7, 2009, with the first Intel-based Chromebooks shipping on June 15, 2011.
