No Chromebook plans for SA

Acer and Samsung have no plans to bring Google’s Chromebook to South Africa in the near future.

Graham Braum, country manager at Acer, said that the plan is to use their Chromebook as a pilot project with selected partners in a few countries.

“These pilot projects will be evaluated and once we have the feedback on these projects a more strategic plan will be implemented,” Braum said.

South Africa won’t form part of the pilot, Acer said.

Google first announced the Chromebook in May 2011 and revealed that Samsung and Acer would be making the first models of the device.

The Chromebook fits somewhere between a pure cloud terminal and netbook, as it features its own storage (16GB SSD) and runs its own operating system (Google Chrome OS, which uses the Linux kernel), but boots straight into the Google Chrome browser.

Instead of traditional applications built for the platform, users install “web apps” from the Chrome Web Store inside the browser.

Chromebook New Tab Page

For IT departments, Google also launched their “Chromebooks for business and education” service, which lets administrators remotely manage users, devices, applications and policies.

Included with the service, which started at $28/user for businesses and $20/user for schools according to the blog post from Google announcing it, was enterprise-level support, device warranties and replacements as well as regular hardware refreshes.