Asus and Google only officially announced availability for their hotly anticipated HDMI dongle based Chromebit compute stick this week, but retail pre-orders are beginning to appear and online computer chain Umart is first off the blocks.
The Chromebit is being offered for pre-order for $149, though no ship date has been announced by Umart, Asus advised earlier this week that the dongle would begin becoming available in Australia in early December. The Chromebit is a nice form-factor for those wanting to get a basic PC or kiosk setup onto a computer screen, or as Google sees it as a lead in to an advanced digital signage system.
At this stage the Chromebit appears to only be offered in Black, with no sign of the delightful looking Tangerine or Blue coloured models we’ve so far seen in promo shots. The Chromebit is a basic spec, with a Rockchip CPU and 2GB of RAM with 16GB of onboard storage and faces stiff competition from the range of Intel Compute sticks that have entered the market running either Windows or Linux based operating systems and in some specs offer more powerful processors and more storage.
We’re very keen to get hands-on with the Asus Chromebit and will be getting a review up as soon as possible. If you’re interested getting a Chromebit you could place a pre-order with Umart, but if that’s not convenient there should be more places to buy the Chromebit coming online soon.
