Chromebox CXI brings low-cost desktop computing

You may not be a big fan of ChromeOS but there's no denying that Chromeboxes on low-spec hardware make it easy to easy to get on line and access web services. And Acer's hoping that's a market with room to grow.

Acer's Chromebox CXI, announced on Thursday (and pictured mounted on a separate Acer monitor above), puts the Chrome OS into a small enclosure measuring 0.6 liters in volume. It runs an Intel Celeron 2957U dual-core 1.4GHz processor, has a 16GB solid-state drive, and promises a boot-up time of just 8 seconds.

The device can include up to 4GB in RAM, has four USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, LAN port for wired network connection, and HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. It's priced from $179.99, including a keyboard and mouse.

Also covered by Engadget.

[Ed. note: I think I want one of these babies, but I'm hoping they'll allow newer versions of ChromeOS to access network shares first, since that's where I've put all my stuff.]