Acer Chairman J.T. Wang recently disclosed he believes his company will be the first to ship Google Chrome OS on a netbook, as the company has now tested the OS for several months.
Acer, the second largest PC manufacturer in the world, has relied heavily on the low-cost, popular netbooks.
In 2010, Acer and others are expected to test the market with Chrome OS-powered devices, even though the platform has several major downsides that may turn off potential consumers. Dell engineers also announced last month that they successfully installed Google Chromium OS -- a project related to Chrome OS -- on a Dell Mini 10v netbook.
Microsoft Windows XP currently is the most popular OS used on netbooks, as Ubuntu Linux and additional Linux flavors have struggled. Google believes its cloud-based OS -- which relies heavily on Google's products -- could one day better compete with Windows.
Joining Acer is Asus, Lenovo, Toshiba, and Hewlett-Packard in the Chrome OS netbook craze -- despite Dell's engineers testing Chromium, the company hasn't publicly announced its intentions to release a Chrome OS-powered netbook.
Google intends to work with manufacturers to create Chrome-based netbooks that have larger screens and keyboards, higher-powered x86 and ARM processors, and products using solid state drives. Engineers also have an interest in 802.11(n) Wi-Fi technology, as the cloud-based OS relies heavily on being connected to the Internet, and booting faster than regular netbooks.
