Chipzilla and Google have been pushing the next generation of Chromebooks from Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Toshiba. Chromebooks are lightweight laptops for people who do most of their computing on the Web. HP's new HP 14 Chromebook has optional 4G mobile connectivity and offers more than nine hours of battery life.

The hardware is supposed to be faster and more power-efficient than before thanks to Intel's Haswell processors. They should be available during the holiday season this year. Asus, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard currently offer Chromebooks based on Intel's older Celeron chips, while Samsung has a Chromebook running on an ARM processor.

Google is trying to expand into desktop-style computing with Chrome OS and thinks that Chromebooks represent 25 percent of sales in the sub-$300 PC category. This sounds a little high to us, but Google googled the figure so it must be true. Acer's Chromebook starts at US$199, while Google's high-end Chromebook Pixel is priced at $1,299.