Rumours were swirling earlier this month that netbooks powered by Google's Chrome OS would - as the company had suggested earlier this year - be shipping just in time for Christmas. Now, though, it seems like a number of outstanding development issues have delayed the completion of the operating system and will push its release into the new year.
According to The Register the search-giant's CEO, Eric Schmidt, told attendees at the Web 2.0 Summit last week that the platform wouldn't be ready for at least the "next few months". He also made it clear that Chrome OS was designed for devices with a keyboard, and that the company would not be pushing it for use on tablets.
However, when TechCrunch followed up on this with Google, it got a bit of a conflicting response. Reps told the news source that the operating system was definitely still on target for late 2010 availability. When pressed, though, they weren't willing to go into detail on whether this would be a final version or some sort of test release. A bit of snooping revealed that the open-source project still had a number of bugs labelled as 'ReleaseBlock-Beta', indicating that there is still quite a bit of work to do before it's ready for prime-time.
ZDNet's Microsoft blogger Mary-Jo Foley also made some inquiries and seemed to get a similar - if slightly clearer - response from Google, when a representative told her that a pre-release version of Chrome OS was planned for later this year.
At this point, it certainly seems unlikely that we'll see Chrome-powered netbooks in 2010, even if the developers are able to release a final version of the code. However, we're sure that we'll see plenty of announcements at CES in the new year.
