Xolo is an Indian smartphone and tablet vendor who just entered the netbook game with the new Chromebook.
The new portable device costs just 12,999 INR or US$205, and is powered by the Rockchip RK3288 processor which GizChina patrons would be well acquainted with. If you aren’t, here’s what the RK3288 has — a quad-core CPU with a 1.8GHz clock rate and a Cortex A17 architecture.
Coming back to the Xolo Chromebook, it has a 11.6-inch screen with a 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of on-board storage (10GB out of which should be available to the end user). You would naturally want to add extra storage, and hence, there’s a microSD slot for that.
To top it off, the device has a 1MP front camera and a 4200mAh battery along with the usual radio (WiFi, Bluetooth) and 2x USB ports, and an HDMI out port.
As usual, 100GB of Google Drive storage can be availed for free (for up to 2 years) with the purchase of the Xolo Chromebook. The Xolo Chromebook is yet to go on sale (it’ll be available on Snapdeal, but an exactly identical device in the form of the Nexian Air Chromebook (which also launched today) can be bought from Amazon already.
i dont really see the problem uninstalling chromeos and installing ubuntu (besides the poor amount of ram)
Get the $3xx Toshiba Chromebook if you want FHD. I’ve got the 720p, or so, version, and I’m pleased with it.. No lag, whatsoever.
2GB of RAM is more than enough to run Ubuntu. Ubuntu can run on computers with as little as 512mb of RAM. Even better is installing one of the lighter versions of Linux that are based on Ubuntu, most of those are designed to run on laptops with very low memory (128mb).
Practically every Chromebook can run Ubuntu, Arch and Bodhi Linux. For an HD model there is the Chromebook Pixel.
They can harly run it, plus I want HD space, a chromebook doesn’t have it.
I run Ubuntu on the original Samsung Arm Chromebook, it runs beautifully. There are some Chromebooks with actual HD’s, Acer has one with 320GB. The ones without HD’s have SD slots and support external hard drives.
Then in my country I only have chromebooks with 32gb of space… a pity (I was told it’s hard to install an ubuntu depending on the cpu) because chromebooks are light (what I need) and not very expensive.
I’ll keep saving money…. XD
Whoever told you its hard doesn’t know what they are talking about. There is entire community dedicated to nothing but running Ubuntu (and other Linux Distros) on Chromebooks. They have step by step guides that take less than 20 minutes start to finish. 32 GB is more than enough to run Ubuntu and you can also expand that with an SD card or external Hard Drive.
“no name brand with a cheap chinese processor”. Neither of those is actually true, Xolo is a very well known brand, maybe not to you personally, but they have been around for a few years now. Rockchip has been around for awhile too, they make some very good SoC’s especially for the home media player market.
It still is overpriced though. For the same price you can probably get and Acer powered by a much more powerful Intel SOC.
For me any Intel SOC is a much better deal because of the open source support anyway. This means I can easily install Linux instead of ChromeOS on it.
I never said it wasn’t overpriced.
Any Chromebook you can install Linux on. Chrome os itself is based off of Gentoo Linux. A number of distros have been ported to run on Arm Chromebooks. I have personally used Ubuntu, Arch and Bodhi on a Samsung Arm Chromebook.
Sure but it’s much nicer when you have open GPU drivers, upstream MESA support and all that…
Till ARM gets their shit togerther and release open source GPU drivers I think Intel stuff is a better deal especially if it can be had for the same price.
Besides I think a Broadwell derived SOC will be much more powerful than a RK3288 ….
Something like Helio X20, now that would be interesting to have in a Chromebook …
Obviously it is easier with Intel but its not impossible with ARM. Personally I would like to see AMD Chromebooks with Radeon GPU’s.
That would be nice indeed …. maybe with their newer APUs somone will build some…. I bet they’re nor asking more than Intel for their SOCs …. well at least they shouldn’t.
AMD actually said earlier this year they won’t enter Chromebooks until they become more popular.