Fans of Chrome OS are getting quite a few choices lately. According to a leaked spec sheet PDF dug up by The Verge, HP is looking to get into the game with its own Chromebook: the HP Pavilion Chromebook 14-c010us.
The spec sheet shows a Chromebook not much different from its brethren: a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 16GB SSD will drive the action on the inside, while three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, a 100 megabit LAN port, a card reader, and a headphone jack will allow for connectivity to other devices. Dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth round out the connectivity options, and a basic webcam is also included. The 3.96 pound laptop is rated for four hours and 15 minutes of battery life, in the same ballpark as Acer's C7.
The biggest difference between HP's Chromebook and the other Intel-based models we've seen so far is its screen, which packs 1366x768 pixels into a 14-inch display rather than the 11.6-inch display used by Acer's C7 Chromebook and the upcoming Lenovo ThinkPad X131e. This gives it a rather unimpressive 112 PPI pixel density, though we expect some users will appreciate the larger and easier-to-read screen.
Like those two models, however, the 14-c010us appears to be a lightly modified version of one of HP's low-end Windows laptops, in this case the HP Pavilion Sleekbook 14-b010us. That laptop is currently listed at $499, but it includes a few cost-increasing amenities that the Chrome OS version doesn't offer—the Core i3 processor and Windows 8 license foremost among them (switching the Sleekbook's 500GB hard drive for 16GB of solid-state storage is probably a wash, price-wise). The differences make it difficult to extrapolate a price, but given past precedent we would expect it to come in at perhaps $299 or $349 when (and if) HP makes it official.
We'll keep an eye out for an official announcement and update this post if new details come to light.
