Enigmatic Asus CEO Jerry Shen has announced during the companies earnings call that Asus is looking to ship a Chromebook in the second half of 2013. Shen advised that they see much potential in the cloud based OS from Google, with specific reference to potential in the government and education, saying
Chromebook is good, not on the consumer side, but it’s good in the education and government side, and some for the commercial side.
In creating their own Chromebook, Asus will join other notebook manufacturers – Samsung, Acer, HP and Lenovo who have all released their own models, although we are yet to see the Lenovo x131e in Australia at this stage.
With Samsung having already advised that Windows 8 devices had failed to boost demand for Windows based computers, it would make sense that other manufacturers would be feeling the same and this could be the reason behind their decision to pursue another avenue. With the manufacturing power of Asus, creating another SKU to retail with ChromeOS – an OS with no licensing fee – it would be quite easy.
Asus has seen success with the ‘other’ Google operating system – Android. With the Taiwanese manufacturer reporting on the same call that they had shipped 3 million Android tablets, which is a large gain on the 600,000 tablets they sold during the same period this time last year.
It will be very interesting to see what Asus can produce. With touch computing code appearing more and more in ChromeOS it would be great to see a ‘Transformer’ style device running ChromeOS as a completely off the wall product that just may work.
What sort of Chromebook would you like to see from Asus?
