Google has announced the Chromebit in March 2015 due to the increased interest in stick form computers, a trend initially launched by Intel with its Compute Stick.
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The Chromebit costs $85 and weighs just 75 grams. There was an interesting yoga-like Chromebook that could flip and fold into a tablet, and also a small little dongle called the Chromebit which turned any HDMI monitor or TV into a computer. Regardless of what you choose, it just needs to have an HDMI port. It has 16 gigs of internal storage – slow and cheap eMMC storage, however; and 2 gigs of RAM. As a mediacenter the Chromecast can deliver, and if you want to get a more ambitious desktop [there are] sticks based on Windows. It will most certainly disappear behind your screen.
You can still do things like watch Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube, but you can also use the Chromebit to work in your cloud office on Google Docs, Office 365, or Basecamp.
Using the USB hub users can then plug in Bluetooth mouse and keyboard devices.
A few of the first reviews are coming in, and TechCrunch figures the Chromebit makes more sense in education or enterprise settings than in your living room. Despite a pocket-sized design, the Chromebit is essentially a Chromebook crammed inside an HDMI dongle.
Don’t expect a power-house.
Brad Bourque barks, “No frills, no excuses: [It] doesn’t disappoint”: The Chromebit is powered by a Rockchip RK3288…SoC with a quad-core 1.8GHz CPU…paired with a quad-core Mali-T624…GPU. It is aimed at outputting a reliable and easy to get into experience.
The Asus Chromebit rolls out for only 85$ for all USA citizens starting today, with future release dates for United Kingdom, Europe and Asia to be announced at a later date, most likely until the end of this year.
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Plans for the Chrome OS to partner up with Android will make this device even greater, allowing it to support Android based applications and games, but those plans are still a ways off in the future, presumably in 2017. In the coming months, it will also be made available in countries such as Finland, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, Spain, Taiwan, Sweden, Norway and the UK. Not much has changed in terms of specs (the color did, though; instead of blue, it will be available in “cacao black” and “tangerine orange”), but now we know the exact price: $85.
