Around this time yesterday we were just starting to hear rumblings about what the launch of Google Music would entail – and they were spot on. The service was debuted as predicted, with all the rumoured features and functionality. We point this out because, 24 hours later, another interesting, and completely plausible, rumour has surfaced courtesy of a story in Forbes.
Forbes asserts that at Google’s Chrome keynote tomorrow morning (or later today, depending on where you are in the world) the search giant will announce that it will be shipping laptops running its browser-only OS, Chrome, for a subscription of $20 per month in a so-called “student plan”.
The plan could be a precursor to the roll-out of an enterprise product, which would offer low-cost laptops tied to Google Apps (the company’s cloud enterprise suite) subscriptions. Business plans aside, a laptop for $240 per year is a hell of a value proposition for students – especially if Google can maintain their partnership with Verizon to give all Chrome OS users a free data allowance every month. The other major advantage of this sort of programme is that Google maintains ownership of the laptop, in theory meaning they will be obligated to upgrade it at some point down the line.
Google is widely expected to announce availability of Chrome OS in their I/O 2011 Day 2 keynote. The cloud OS was previewed at last years event, however once the preview code made its way into the hands of users it became clear that the fledgling OS was not ready for mass consumption. Since this limited preview the Chrome team have been keeping quiet about their plans – we’re hoping all will be revealed tomorrow.
You can watch along at I/O Live – the keynote kicks off at 9am PDT on Wednesday.
