Toshiba’s First Chromebook Hits The Market for $280

Toshiba jumped into the Chromebook market earlier this year, unveiling its first Chrome OS-powered laptop last month at CES. Now the Toshiba Chromebook is available starting at just $280.

For the unfamiliar, a Chromebook is a laptop that runs the Chrome web browser (like Internet Explorer or Firefox but made by Google) as it's operating system instead of Windows 7/8 or Mac OS X.  It requires a consistent internet connection as all of your computing will be done through the web.  Google provides Google Docs for free that covers your word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software that are all compatible with Microsoft Office. With Google Docs, gone are the days of worrying about saving your spreadsheet or document every 2 minutes so you don't lose anything since saving is automatic every few keystrokes and gone are the days of worry about your hard drive crashing and losing your information since, with the constant internet connection, everything is saved to your own personal drive (storage space) with Google.  All of this for free.

Despite its low cost, the Toshiba Chromebook comes with one of the biggest screens in its class, offering a 13.3-inch 1366 x 768-pixel display. Under the hood it’s equipped with an Intel Celeron 2955U Haswell processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of SSD storage, and a battery that the company claims will last up to nine hours per charge. The laptop also comes with HDMI output, an SD card reader and a built-in webcam.

You can pick up the new Chromebook today online, though there’s no word on when the device will be available in stores. Both Adorama and Amazon are selling the device for $279.99, while Toshiba is inexplicably charging $299.99 for the same model.

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Source:  Toshiba; Amazon.com; Google.com;