Specs of first Chrome OS devices leak

As first Chrome OS notebooks are about to hit the market, specs leak to the web pertaining to Chrome OS machines from Samsung and Acer plus a mysterious touch device. As expected, these forthcoming machines ditch hard drives in favor of presumably scarce solid state storage because pretty much everything sans the operating system code resides in the cloud.

Engadget detailed Samsung’s machine code-named “Alex” which is rumored to pack in a ten-inch display at 1280-by-800 pixel resolution, a Synaptics touchpad, a webcam, Bluetooth and a Qualcomm Gobi 2000 3G cellular connectivity. The outed processor is said to be of a 1.5GHz dual-core Atom N550 variety. Two gigabytes of RAM and a SanDisk solid state drive of unknown capacity were also spotted.

CrunchGear also reported about a Chrome OS machine from Acer. Reportedly called the ZGB, little is known of this device besides an Atom CPU and a 1366-by-768 resolution screen. The publication also spotted more details emerging about a slate-like Chrome OS device code-named Seaboard. It’s rumored to come equipped with a Tegra 2 chip, 1GB of RAM, two USB ports and HDMI video output. However, it’s unclear at this stage whether this device is a slate or a netbook.

Google promised first Chrome OS netbooks and notebooks for the first half of 2011. We will probably learn more at the upsoming Google I/O conference scheduled to run between May 10-11. It’s been reported that Google is considering a subscription-based option where users would be able to get a Chrome OS notebook for twenty bucks a month. The deal is said to include regular hardware refreshes as well.