Google announces the Chromebit, an easy way to bring Chrome OS to your TV

Google has just announced a new and affordable way to bring Chrome OS to your television. The Chromebit, which is essentially a Chromebook packed into an HDMI dongle, will turn your TV into a fully-functional computer for a pretty low cost.

The first Chromebit device is manufactured by ASUS and actually packs quite the punch. It has a Rockchip 3288 ARM Cortex-A17 processor, 2GB of RAM, a Mali 760 GPU, 16GB of internal storage, one USB port, Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11ac. The device is a bit bigger than a Chromecast, but the Chromebit actually swivels around allowing you to hide the device from sticking out of the side of your television. Google says the device will become available sometime later this summer for less than $100 in silver, blue and orange variants. This first generation device is still in testing, so the company couldn’t comment on its battery life quite yet.

The dongle made by Asus is just the first of many that will eventually make their way to market, though. Google says its hoping other manufacturers will jump on board, so we’ll likely see a few more of these devices launch with varying price points and different features sometime in the next few months.

So what do you think? Are you interested in the Chromebit?