Google has just begun a two-day long game wherein it will post links to famous places around the web where you can now find a link to get preview access to the company’s Chromebook web-only notebooks. The first “clue” (just a link, really) went up minutes ago and sends visitors to an archive of the memo that Tim Berners-Lee first sent out to the world calling for help in creating the WorldWideWeb. There on the page you’ll see a big Chrome logo overlay, which when clicked on takes you to a page where you can purchase one of a limited number of Chromebooks.
The Samsung device has WiFi and 3G and sells for $499 through Amazon. It looks like nicer hardware than the press-preview Chromebook that Google sent out late last year, which had a trackpad so bad it was hard to enjoy the device. Will people purchase these preview Chromebooks for $499? I don’t know. Will the “game” Google’s playing prove compelling to people? I doubt it; it seems that even other Google departments have fallen prey to the old story of the scarce Gmail invites, which has lead other launches to be rationed and gamelike for years, whether that made sense or not for the particular product.
Below: It’s white on the outside, black on the inside and available for limited pre-orders now through Amazon.
Richard MacManus
wrote about the Chromebook last month
and predicted that the price may be too high for the market to bear, relative to other laptops on the market. It’s notable also that this isn’t the
$20 per month per student Chrome OS education rental offering
that’s launching yet, either.
I’ve used a Chrome OS laptop for a while and it was nice, once I got over the trackpad issue. But when I’m looking for instant-on and a light-weight way to surf the web, I’m pretty happy with my iPad. Lightweight devices that do most of their work in the cloud make sense to me as a vision of the future, though.
What about you? Are you interested in playing Google’s game and getting a preview Samsung Chromebook for $499?
