Acer Corp. shot down speculation that it plans to release a series of netbooks running Google Inc.’s Chrome OS at the upcoming Computex exhibition in Taipei.
“Despite recent rumors in the press regarding the launch of Chrome OS based netbooks at Computex, Acer today confirms that it has no short-term plans for such a product,” the company said in an e-mail statement.
Chrome OS was announced by Google last July. At the time, the company promised “netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.”
Acer, which sells more netbooks than any other company, said Google’s operating system is interesting, but that its “potential from a consumer’s perspective” needs further study. The statement did not define what the period of time covered by its short-term plans, leaving open the possibility that a Chrome-based netbook could be made available before the end of this year.
“Acer … (will) be following the development and progress of Google Chrome and the evolution of Google’s overall product strategy very closely,” the statement said.
At Computex last year, Acer showed off a netbook running Google’s Android operating system, which is meant to be used on smartphones and netbooks, therefore overlapping with Chrome to some extent. Several months later, Acer did ship a netbook with Android — the Aspire One D250, which had the operating system installed in a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP.
Acer is rumored to be planning to release another Android netbook, the Aspire One D260, which will be a dual-boot machine that comes with Windows 7 installed.
