Just like numerous companies initiated production of netbooks back in 2008 – 2009 timeframe in a bid to sell low-cost systems instead of mainstream products, many others these days release their notebooks based on Google Chrome operating system. Apparently, Hewlett-Packard is also about to adopt the web-based platform from Google.

HP’s Pavilion Chromebook will be considerably larger than Chrome-based PCs available today, according to a leaked PDF. The system will feature 14” display with 1366*768 resolution and will be powered by Intel Celeron processor (1.1GHz), 2GB of DDR3 memory, 16GB solid-state storage and other hardware. The laptop's battery is projected to last for about 4 hours and 15 minutes, probably due to large display as well as rather poor work of modern processor’s energy-saving technologies on Google Chrome. The price of the device remains unclear.

Given the screen size, HP wants to position its Pavilion Chromebook as an extremely cost-efficient mainstream notebook, which means that the mobile PC will compete with fully-fledged Microsoft Windows-based personal computers. While HP’s offering will be in many ways unique, it remains to be seen how successful it will be among end-users looking for mainstream PC with 14” display.

The core of each Chromebook is the Google Chrome web browser. Google hopes that end-users will make use of various Internet-based applications than traditional programs. Chromebooks employ the principle of "defense in depth" to provide multiple layers of protection, including sandboxing, data encryption and verified boot. The web does have a lot of various applications, however, their capabilities, performance and quality are much lower compared to traditional programs. Google hopes that with HTML5 and other open standards, web applications "will soon be able to do anything traditional applications can do, and more". This, however, is unlikely to happen since traditional programs are not standing still.

Even though the so-called Chromebooks can become rather popular for a short period of time among enthusiasts (Acer recently said that 5% to 10% of laptops it sold from November to late January were Chromebooks), they will hardly satisfy the mainstream users as they are generally even less capable than netbooks five years ago and rely on software end-users simply do not know.

HP did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: HP, Hewlett-Packard, Chrome, Google, Chromebook, Intel, Celeron