Taking the Chromebook Challenge

The Gadget Wisdom labs has recently acquired an Acer C7 Chromebook for testing purposes. The C7 has a list price of $199 and offers an 11.6″ screen, a Celeron processor. The hard drive and memory are upgradeable.

It’s competition in the Chromebook space is the $249 ARM-based Samsung Chromebook. Â But, while the Samsung is sleeker than the Acer C7, it lacks the possible benefits of a x86 processor and upgradable components if you want to hack the thing.

But, why buy a Chromebook(other than the compelling price for a secondary system), even if you want to hack it to pieces? Many people live in their browser anyway, so why not have a computer that lives entirely in the browser?

So, that is a challenge we’re prepared to try. We’ve been setting up web-based equivalents of our standard daily programs, and will be trying to live with ChromeOS only while our primary machine gets a clean install of the latest version of its OS.

Will we last a whole week, which is the goal? Or is ChromeOS only good for trips where all you want is a browser? How does it compare to our experiments with the Asus Transformer, which is Android with a keyboard dock.

Stay tuned.