Acer "Kiev" Chromebox Tipped: Can Google Hit The $99 Price Point?

Acer is expected to reveal a new Chromebox to follow on from its low-cost C7 Chromebook laptop, putting Google's Chrome OS in a compact desktop form-factor. The cloud-centric slab (only a mockup shown here, since no official images have leaked yet) contains Inte's 2.7GHz Pentium G630 processor and 2GB of memory, François Beaufort reports, along with a 500GB hard-drive for local storage of files, and has been developed by Acer and the Google Chrome OS team under the "Kiev" codename.

Other specifications of the Chromebox are unclear, though we'd guess at something along the lines of Acer's C7 Chromebook; that has VGA, HDMI, several USB 2.0 ports, and integrated WiFi, though we'd expect Acer to throw wired ethernet into the Chromebox too.

Acer isn't the only company flirting with the desktop form-factor. Samsung also recently refreshed its Chromebox, slapping an Intel Core i5 processor inside along with 4GB of RAM; it only has 16GB of local storage, though uses flash memory rather than what's presumably a traditional spinning-platter drive in the Acer version. Samsung's Chromebox has USB 2.0, ethernet, DVI, DisplayPort, Bluetooth and WiFi, but not VGA or HDMI.

Pricing and availability for the Chromebox are unknown, though there's speculation that Acer and Google will aim for a highly-competitive $99 price point. That seems possible, given the C7 is $199, and since the components Acer is believed to have used for the desktop should be relatively inexpensive. Where the x86 chip in the C7 meant battery life proved lacking in comparison to Samsung's Series 3 Chromebook, power consumption is less of an issue for a desk-bound computer.

[via Chrome Story]