News - Acer Chromebook 13 features an Nvidia Tegra K1 processor

[HEXUS]

The first K1 powered Chromebook offers a "record setting 13 hour battery life".

Read more.

[scaryjim]

So how many native ChromeOS games are there to play on your massively powerful K1 SoC? And how many WebGL sites? I really can't see how a Tegra K1 chip is meant to make sense on a Chromebook. I guess they can't just stick Android on it though, otherwise it'd basically be a cheaper and more useful Shield tablet...

[Jowsey]

So how many native ChromeOS games are there to play on your massively powerful K1 SoC? And how many WebGL sites? I really can't see how a Tegra K1 chip is meant to make sense on a Chromebook. I guess they can't just stick Android on it though, otherwise it'd basically be a cheaper and more useful Shield tablet...

Is it possible to route these devices and drop a andoird ROM on ? That's shouldn't be a huge issue or am I missing something ?

[scaryjim]

I think most proper Chromebooks have some sort of secure BIOS making it very difficult (although probably not impossible) to root/hack and re-rom them. Then again, the only actual benefit to doing something like that would be if you desperately wanted a 13" android device (chromebooks seem to be the only thing coming in 13" at a reasonable price nowadays, which I consider a great shame...).

EDIT: if you're desperate for an Android laptop, you only need to shell out £200....

[wasabi]

Can you sideload APKs onto these? I don't entirely trust Google not to deliberately cripple them.

[scaryjim]

Can you sideload APKs onto these? I don't entirely trust Google not to deliberately cripple them.

Onto Chromebooks? Not as far as I know. It's a compeltely different OS to Android. it's basically a lightweight linux + minimal window manager + Chrome browser. It's actually quite a nice OS for doing general web-based stuff, and if you're already invested in the whole Google infrastructure - Docs, Drive, Gmail, Plus etc. - they work really quite well. There's an open source version called ChromiumOS you can download and play with, and I believe there's a method for converting ChromiumOS into full ChromeOS (which gives better plugin support amongst other enhancements). Basically it'll run anything that you can run in the desktop Chrome browser, and there's quite a lot of webapps available on Chrome now....

[wasabi]

Onto Chromebooks? Not as far as I know. It's a compeltely different OS to Android. it's basically a lightweight linux + minimal window manager + Chrome browser. It's actually quite a nice OS for doing general web-based stuff, and if you're already invested in the whole Google infrastructure - Docs, Drive, Gmail, Plus etc. - they work really quite well. There's an open source version called ChromiumOS you can download and play with, and I believe there's a method for converting ChromiumOS into full ChromeOS (which gives better plugin support amongst other enhancements). Basically it'll run anything that you can run in the desktop Chrome browser, and there's quite a lot of webapps available on Chrome now....

So extensions will all work okay? Ghostery / Adblock plus etc - that is what I'm worried about google crippling...

[scaryjim]

Google's own ChromeOS wiki lists both AdBlock and Ghostery as curated (recommended/tested, I guess?) extensions, and AFAICT all other Chrome extensions should work as normal.