Chromebooks are becoming a little hard to find in Australia, with most companies focusing their efforts in other markets where adoption has been a little higher. This is a shame, because devices like Acer’s new 13-inch R13 Chromebook sound amazing already, but if they weren’t good enough already, they’re about to get the ability to run native Android apps as well, making them significantly more useful.
In the current Chrome OS beta channel — version 55 — Android apps are supported, which means it’ll becoming to the standard, stable channel soon, perhaps as soon as a couple of weeks, but more likely probably December sometime.
If you’ve somehow got an Acer R13, you can flick your Chromebook over to the beta channel quite easily to take advantage of the features today. To do that, head to Chrome settings, click on “About Chrome OS” toward the top of the display, hit “more info,” and “change channel.” From there select beta, give the Chromebook a few minutes to download the update, restart, and you’re good to go. Once the functionality hits stable, you can downgrade with the same process (although a reset will be required and you’ll lose your user data).
Now, if only we could get some decent Chromebooks on sale in Australia.
So, as someone who is tempted to enter the market for a new ‘good’ Chromebook, what are the models that you’d recommend and that are available for purchase in Australia?
yes – i would love to know this too!!…i read something good about the Acer R11 4GB version, but I think its about 12 months old now…