ATLANTA — New laptops running Google’s Chrome operating system offer a new approach in portable computing: Games, productivity tools and anything else you might need are handled by distant computers connected to the Internet. With this method, you don’t store data on a hard drive inside the computer. That streamlines things, at the cost of having stronger, standalone applications that normally handle these tasks. But the trade-off might be worth it for the more casual consumers of online content.
Chromebook is Google’s way of showcasing its “cloud computing” philosophy. Samsung and Acer are making the first Chromebooks using Google’s Chrome Web browser and an underlying operating system based on Linux.
Samsung’s Wi-Fi-only model, above, retails for $429. It comes co-branded with Google’s Chrome logo. It has two USB ports and slots for an SD memory card and a SIM phone card. You can connect an external monitor to it. You can also connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi, but there’s no Ethernet port to allow wired connections to a network.
