New $199 Acer Chromebook Is Cheaper Than Samsung's

Signs are stil appearing that Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, after a somewhat lukewarm early reception for it. Recently, we covered the arrival of Samsung's new Chromebook portable computer running Google's Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249.Now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook, shown here, that sells for only $199. These devices, at these price points, along with some of the bundled deals that come with them, signal that a number of Google's expected Chrome OS strategies have finally come to fruition.

As is true with the Samsung Chromebook, Google is offering free giveaways worth more than the cost of the Acer Chromebook. If you buy the 3-pound Acer system, you get two years of 100GB of free storage through Google Drive, and 12 free Gogo Internet passes.

It's no secret that Chrome OS has not been the same striking success for Google that the Android OS has been. In the past, I've written about several possible avenues that Google could take to rectify that situation. In this post, I suggested that it would be wise for Google to subsidize some of the costs and throw in free services for Chrome OS-based portable computers to seed a market for them. In this post, I suggested that Google could offer free storage incentives to accompany new Chromebooks through its brand new Google Drive service. And in this post, I suggested that Google could successfully position Chrome OS as a secondary operating system--much as many of us run Linux alongside proprietary operating systems.

With the arrival of these very low cost Chromebooks, all of these concepts are coming together.  Going forward, Chromebooks will surely come with even more valuable incentives and sell for prices that make it easy to run Chrome OS alongside other platforms.