$85 ASUS and Google Chromebit officially launched

It’s pretty understandable if you had forgotten all about the Chromebit, as it was announced by Asus and Google all the way back in March this year. The little Chrome OS HDMI stick has finally arrived ready for sale, carrying a very modest retail price of just $85.

Ideas like the Chromebit have been done before, there are plenty of Android HDMI device that can turn your TV into an Android computer, for example. However, this stick is packing Google’s Chrome OS from the Chromebook range of laptops. The head of the stick can also swivel around, to neatly fit into some of the more difficultly positioned TV HDMI ports out there.

For hardware, the Chromebit is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex-A17 based Rockchip 3288 SoC, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. The dongle is compatible with 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and also comes with a USB port, for extra storage and whatnot. While not quite as powerful as Chromebook hardware, this should be good enough for all the web browsing basics, but I wouldn’t bank on much else. Don’t forget, you will need your own keyboard and mouse setup as well.

The Chromebit will be arriving at a number of US retailers, including Amazon, Fry’s and Newegg. The device is also heading to Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and the UK at launch, with additional countries likely to follow in the future.