Kogan introduces world’s first Chromium OS laptops

The Kogan Agora Laptop, whose operation is entirely in the cloud and boots in 4.5 seconds, will be on sale from Friday for £269 in the United Kingdom and $349 in Australia and will be shipped direct to customers the following week.

“We’ve been able to beat the rest of the world to bring the first commercially available laptop running Googles Chromium OS,” said Ruslan Kogan, founder and CEO.

Developed in 2009, the Chromium OS is the open source development version of the Google Chrome operating system and is still in its early stages.

“What we’ve found from talking to our customers is that many of them are already using cloud services without even realising it. They’re uploading photos to services like Flickr, storing all their contacts in Gmail, and even hosting files on DropBox,” said Kogan.

The low-powered laptop comes with 1GB of RAM and a 30GB SSD and is powered by an Intel Celeron M ULV processor, with a display of 11.6-inch (1366×768) and 3 USB ports. Battery life is of about 3.5 hours.

“Samsung and Acer announced Chromebooks based on Chromium OS last month, but we’ve beaten them to market. Kogan is the most agile consumer electronics manufacturer in the world. We react faster to market trends than anyone else,” the company said in a statement.