According to the Wall Street Journal's "people familiar with the matter", Google has developed touchscreen Chromebooks and has plans to sell them later this year. They say it's unclear just who is building them and exactly when they will go on sale. So far we've seen vendors like Samsung, Acer, and most recently HP, offer Chrome OS based laptops with various types if hardware inside. Google currently sells Acer and Samsung models directly through Google Play.
Developers have been seeing touch-friendly changes to the Chrome OS code for about a year now, so we knew this would happen sooner or later. Should this rumor turn out to be true, it shows that Google is happy competing against themselves by offering two touch-based operating systems to consumers. If priced appropriately, sleek touchscreen Chrome OS devices will certainly appeal to many, and drive people to use more Google services. Chrome devices may or may not be the next big thing, but we're interested in seeing what Google has to offer.
Source: WSJ
