Google to lease Chrome OS laptops for 20$/month

A senior Google executive has reportedly told Forbes, that the company will begin leasing Chrome laptops for $20 per month in a “student package” that includes both hardware and access to online services. This comes as an announcement after late last year, Google put out a call to participants to sign up to become beta testers of free notebooks that ran its fledgling Chrome OS.

Seems like the beta tests went well, since Google will be hurling it’s Chrome notebooks sometime in mid-2011, with leasing opportunities in partnership with Horizon for the data plan.

“Small and medium-sized businesses are banging on our doors to get something like this,” the executive said, suggesting that the “student package” initiative could be a way for Google to test the waters before releasing a comparable offering for the enterprise.

And at 20$/month, students seems like the best guinea pigs on the market for testing the Chrome OS out. Testing the product on students also builds in demand as they graduate and join the workforce.

The Google executive said the company is very close to solving the problem of working offline, in cases where there is temporarily no web access. That appears to be the Chrome laptops’ biggest hurdle.

Details concerning the notebook’s specs, screenshots and the likes have yet to be released or leaked, but expect to see the Chrome OS popping out a lot in the tech and media world in the near future.