Kogan Beats Samsung and Acer With World's First Chrome OS Laptop

cylonlover writes "Australian manufacturer Kogan will ship the world's first notebook featuring Google's open source Chrome OS from June 7. The release date for the 11.6'' Agora Chromium Laptop means that Kogan has pipped Samsung and Acer by just over a week in the race to be the first company to offer a Chromium OS notebook."

Chrome or Chromium?

[SanityInAnarchy]

If Kogan is shipping Chrome, and Samsung and Acer are shipping Chromium, these are different things. Not terribly different, but different enough that it'd be interesting either way.

See, Chromium is an open-source project. Chrome is Google's proprietary fork of Chromium -- essentially, Google tracks Chromium, but (I think?) adds some stuff to it. While they've removed h.264, that was a good example -- Google can pay for a license and include any amount of proprietary h.264 code they want in Chrome, but the Chromium project can't do the same.

Please correct me if this has changed. It'd be cool if there were no remaining proprietary bits in Chrome (or in Chrome OS), but I doubt it. The Wikipedia page on Chromium OS doesn't list any significant differences vs Chrome OS, but if the browsers themselves are significantly different [wikipedia.org], surely the OSes have to be?

Australian manufacturer?

[scdeimos]

'fraid not. Kogan is an Australian brand name, sure enough, but all of the manufacturing happens through third parties in China. Kogan manufactures about as much in Australia as Apple does in the United States.