New Asus Chromebook Flip with Touchscreen

Google has been putting their OS on a lot more devices lately, like the Asus Chromebook Flip and the Asus Chromebit. This spring, the Chromebook Flip comes out with a touch screen that rotates 360 degrees. The Chromebit comes out this summer, and it will let you use the Chrome OS on your HDTVs.

The Asus Chromebook will have a price tag of $249, and looks a lot like one of the Yoga notebooks. It has a 10.1 inch IPS display and weighs less than 2 pounds even with it's all metal chassis. It will be powered by a Rockchip 3288 processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC flash memory. There will also be a more expensive version that will have 4GB of RAM and 16GB of SSD storage. It will have 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, and will be able to last for up to 10 hours on a full charge.

Right now the Chrome OS is not optimized for touch screens yet, so it is a bit unusual that they added one to this notebook. Not only that, but it's pretty odd that they would add a touch screen to a budget system at all. Hopefully it works out great and the added feature really pays off.

As far as what's under the hood, the Chromebit has  pretty much the exact same stuff as the Chromebook Flip actually. It is a little bit bigger than a regular thumb drive and will have an HDMI port and a USB 2.0 port that it will be powered by. It will be able to connect to the Internet via 802.11ac Wi-Fi and it also has Bluetooth capabilities.

Asus is not the only company that is coming out with new Chromebooks though. Haier and Hisense have both announced 11 inch Chromebooks that seem to have the same internals as the new Asus coming out this spring. The only major difference is that they will cost about $100 less than the Asus. Of course, it doesn't look like they will have a touch screen, but if the Asus touch screen doesn't go over well because of the operating system, then you might spend $100 dollars less and have something that is less troublesome. I guess we will find out soon enough when we can get our hands on them!

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Google Now Allowing Education and Business Chromebook Customers to Pay Upfront

One of the biggest things to hit the tech world a while back was the fact that Google, the search engine superpower, was expanding into hardware with its all new Chromebooks, all new cloud-focused laptops aimed at the education and business sectors. What made the announcement even more interesting was the fact that Google would offer business and education clients a 3-year monthly payment subscription-based payment plan, charging no upfront costs whatsoever. However, Google has just recently announced that it will begin allowing businesses to pay for their Chromebooks in full upfront.

Google has stated that it discovered some businesses were simply unable to budget for a three-year commitment requiring annual cycles. As a result of these findings, Google is offering education and business customers the choice to pay upfront for their Chromebook with one-year access to a web-based admin management console, phone support and hardware warranty. After the initial year, customers will have the option to pay a monthly fee for the second and third year of management console access and support.

Customers in the education industry are able to get their hands on a Chromebook for $449 if they choose the WiFi option or $519 if they go with the 3G option. Business customers will have to pay $559 for the WiFi version and $639 for the 3G version. The changing policy for the education and business sectors is notable for many reasons, primarily for the fact that we have yet to hear anything from Google about success in this market. I know it has only been four months, but with the way information flies around the internet you would expect to have heard something by now even if it was leaked information or a rumor.

Nevertheless, Google is still very well known for its policy of launching during a beta and it appears as if that applies to the company's enterprise business models as well. I guess we will just have to wait and see how this business venture plays out for Google, though I don't think the company will take any serious financial dips if the project doesn't quite meet expectations.

Source: The Next Web - Google drops Chromebook business, education subscription-only policy, lets them pay up front

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