Acer, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba plan to launch Chromebooks in the fourth quarter with Intel's "Haswell" processor inside, returning to what the Chromebook was originally known for: all-day battery life.
While the new Chromebooks are expected to be flagship products for their respective brands, don't expect a repeat of the Chromebook Pixel; that product, which paired an Intel "Ivy Bridge" Core processor with an incredible 2560-by-1700 pixel touch display, was a "prototype" to show off the power of the Chromebook platform and will not be repeated, Caesar Sengupta, director of product management at Google, told a small roundtable of reporters on Wednesday.
The HP Chromebook 14, which HP executives showed off on Wednesday afternoon, is a 14-inch clamshell notebook that will be available in four colors. Also on display was an unnamed 11.6-inch Acer Chromebook. The Acer Chromebook was identified as the "ZHN C Test" on the back label. Toshiba executives didn't attend.
The HP Chromebook 14.
HP vice president Mike Nash said that the battery life of the Chromebook 14 comes in at about 10 hours. That's good news for Chromebook buyers who are used to long battery life. The Chromebooks will offer 50 percent more battery life and be 15 percent faster than the Ivy Bridge models available today, Intel vice president of software and services Doug Fisher said during a keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
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