Following the arrival of Android apps on Chrome OS, new Chromebook models should be coming soon. Among those is a reported addition to Acer’s R lineup with the 13.3-inch Acer R13. While there’s not too much new about this Chromebook, it will reportedly be the first Chrome OS device powered by a chipset from MediaTek.

expand full story

In this week’s top stories: The next version of Android is officially ‘Nougat’, more Nexus leaks, new Chromebooks, the latest new apps and updates & much more. Head below our handy roundup of links to this these and the rest of this week’s top shared stories.

expand full story

Announced earlier this year at CES, the Lenovo ThinkPad 13 Chromebook is now available from the company’s online store. With the same design and durability as the Windows version, the Chromebook variant is powered by Intel’s new Skylake processor and will support Android apps later this year.

expand full story

HP has today launched the latest version of its lower-end Chromebook, the HP Chromebook 11-inch G5. At first glance there might not appear to be anything special about this laptop, but there are a couple of standout features: the laptop offers more than 12 hours of battery life, and there’s also a model that includes a touchscreen (essential for those planning to take advantage of recently-announced Android app support coming to more Chrome OS devices later this year)…

expand full story

Despite having been mocked because of its browser-only OS limitation, Chromebooks have seen an astonishing degree of success in certain sectors including education, mostly due to the combination of high efficiency and low costs.

But when MacBook enclaves Apple CEO Tim Cook‘s old high school start making “the switch” to Chromebooks from MacBooks, we take notice…

expand full story

It looks like there’s a little tidbit of information that might have been originally planned for the keynote (pulled because of time restraints, maybe?). According to a session description now on the Google I/O website, Google “announced” today that the Google Play Store is coming to Chrome…

Today we announced that we’re adding the best mobile app experiences in the world, Android apps and the Google Play store, to the best browser in the world, Chrome! Come to this session and test your Android apps for Chrome OS. You will get hands on help from our friendly engineers on how to optimize your Android app for Chromebooks. Oh, and we will also be giving the first 50 developers to show up a free Chromebook so they can get a head start bringing their apps to Chrome!

This isn’t exactly surprising as we saw evidence that this was in the cards all the way back in April, but it’s cool nonetheless to see it become official. It looks like this session is going to involve Google showing devs how to test their Android apps on the desktop platform. Also worth noting: the first 50 devs to show up will get a free Chromebook.

We’re on the ground at the event now, so stay tuned as we learn more.