Toshiba unveils its first Chromebook, adding to the crowd

Toshiba has unveiled their first Chromebook at CES and it comes as no surprise that the Japanese company wants to get in the Chrome OS hype, after reports and analysis pointing to the growing cheap netbook market, ruled by Google’s web-based operating system.

The Toshiba Chromebook is a pretty average looking device, it comes with the clam-shell design we have seen on plenty of netbooks in the past. Internally the Chromebook is running an Intel Bay Trail processor and comes with a 13.3-inch 1366 x 768 display.

There is a HD webcam and stereo speakers include on the Toshiba Chromebook, alongside 16GB of solid state drive storage and 2GB of RAM. On the ports side, Toshiba has added a HDMI port, two USB 3.0 ports and an SD card slot.

Battery life has not been tested yet, but Toshiba has said the Chromebook can run for up to nine hours without a charge. Most Chromebook’s have only lasted a few hours in our tests and we doubt Toshiba has made some breakthrough in the battery life segment.

This is a Chromebook and it comes running the latest version of Chrome OS, the web based operating system Google has been pushing for netbooks. Chrome OS offers a selection of Google’s best applications, including Gmail and Drive.

As with all Chromebooks, there is two years of 100GB free Google Drive storage, immensely adding to the storage capabilities on this machine. Since Chrome OS is all browser based, users do not need to worry about downloading Photoshop or any other high-resource applications.

Toshiba’s Chromebook will come for $279 and should be on shelves by February. Toshiba is the sixth Chromebook partner and goes up against some stiff competition in the cheap netbook market, including Samsung, HP, Dell, Lenovo and Acer.