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20 -May -2012 - 23:10
Saturday, 21 May 2011 14:36

Utah company says it has first Chrome OS desktop.

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(Sarah A. Miller | The Salt Lake Tribune) Xi3 Corp. founder and CEO Jason Sullivan holds a small modular computer the company is launching that it says is the first desktop computer to run on Google's Chrome operating system. The computer is expected to be on the market later this year.

By Tom Harvey

The Salt Lake Tribune

Xi3 will begin selling the computers that will use Web-based Google system later this year.

A Salt Lake City company made Friday what it says is the first announcement of a desktop computer that will run on Google’s Internet-focused Chrome operating system.

Xi3 Corp., a startup that will begin selling its tiny desktop computers soon, said it will have Chrome-based units available later this year.

Last week, Google announced that the first laptop computers operated by Chrome would be available June 15 in the United States and six other countries, and then in other countries in coming months.

Jason Sullivan, Xi3 founder and CEO, said the ChromiumPC running on the company’s Xi3 modular computer will access Web-based (also called cloud) applications, such as Google Docs, rather than traditional systems where the operating system and applications are installed on a hard drive.

"This is just the next logical step where instead of some of the applications being Web-driven, all the applications are Web-driven," said Sullivan. "That requires very little cost on the computer side from a software perspective."

The ChromiumPC will be available later in the year, but the company did not announce a price range.

Michael Gartenberg, a technology analyst at Gartner, pointed Friday to the Chromebooks in arguing that the Chrome OS future depends on what functions the machines have and at what price.

"What we are seeing now is some of these early Chromebooks are coming into the same price point where you could get a much more capable and full-featured device," he said. "That’s going to be a challenge for these Chrome devices. Unless the economics makes sense, then you’re paying computing prices for something that just runs a Web browser."

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