A photo emerged in a now-deleted tweet of what appears to be an Acer tablet running Chrome OS. The photo shows what would be the first ever Chrome OS tablet.

I would love a Chrome OS tablet. I would love it even more if it got 8 to 10 hours of performance. A Chrome OS tablet is exactly what I wanted more than two years ago when I purchased my current tablet, a cube i7. After years of using iPads and Android tablets, and downloading apps to complete specific tasks, what I figured out is that all I wanted and needed was a tablet that ran the full desktop version of Chrome. I bought the cube i7 because it was the cheapest and most powerful (at the time) Win10 tablet that could run the desktop version of Chrome.

I have found the overall iPad and Android tablet experience lacking, but specifically the browser experience to be inadequate–no browser support for extensions (uBlock, HoverZoom, VPN, etc.) and some web apps weren’t supported by a mobile browser or performed terribly. I recognize that the iPad and Samsung Tab are mobile devices and meant to run mobile apps (read: less resource-intensive), however if I can run graphic-intensive games or photo, video, and audio editing apps on these mobile devices, why can’t I get a simple browser extension?

About 95%* of my time on the cube i7 is spent in Chrome and has been a great stopgap solution. I can perform all of my leisurely activities (e.g. reading articles, watching videos, listening to music, etc.) and be somewhat productive (e.g. GMail, Office 365, etc.) with just the on-screen keyboard. My biggest complaint is with the cube’s battery life. Running Chrome on a Win10 mobile device is not ideal–Chrome is a resource hog and its running on top of a full desktop operating system, which is also a resource hog, and battery performance suffers. I get maybe 6 hours of usage out of a full charge.

A Chrome OS tablet, running a less resource-intensive operating system, on either an ARM or a low-end x86 processor, with a decent-sized battery should get me the tablet I wanted two years ago. Hopefully Google, Acer, and others will reveal more about their Chrome OS tablets later this year.

* The other 5% of my time is in Atom, puTTy, Twitter (Win10 app), Netflix (Win10 app), and VLC.