Samsung and Intel Stay Committed to Chromebooks

Samsung has announced its new Chromebook 2, a good looking model that joins a slew of new Chromebooks arriving in the market. With the holiday season approaching, it's looking like portable computers running Chrome OS and featuring very low price points will be very big sellers.

Meanwhile, Intel is still committing to chips for Chromebooks, which could help them get boosted performance and more.

Many Samsung Chromebooks have been deployed in schools, where low price points are a major attraction, and the new Chromebook 2 is ruggedized for use in schools.

The Chromebook 2 has a USB 2.0 and a USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port, a headphone jack, and a micro SD slot, along with a 720p camera.

An Intel 2.58GHZ N2840 processor--a member of the Celeron family of CPUs-- is onboard, but, like many Chromebooks this one comes with only 2GB of RAM. 

One of the real attractions to the new Chromebook 2 is its price, which is a very low $250. 

As ZDNet notes, Intel chips are showing up in many new Chromebooks:

"With many of these dirt-cheap Chrome OS notebooks being powered by ARM-based processors, there's been thought that this new niche could threaten Intel's bottom line.  Just yesterday, two major manufacturers dropped new Chromebook configurations featuring Intel inside. Samsung shouted the news far and wide that its Chromebook 2 will include a Celeron processor, though Dell was more discrete about adding a Core i3 version of the Chromebook 11 to its lineup."

It seems clear that Intel wants to participate in the Chromebook trend.

It's not yet clear if Samsung will focus exclusively on Chromebooks, but it is making bigger and bigger bets on them.  Last year, Chromebooks sold brisky during the holidays. Look for these new systems to sell very well during this holiday season, and introduce many young people to the basics of working with data and applications in the cloud.