At a December 7, 2010 press briefing, Google announced the Cr-48 laptop, a reference hardware design to test the Chrome OS operating system. Chromium-48 is one of the most unstable isotopes of the metallic element chromium. The laptop's design broke convention by replacing the Caps lock key with a dedicated search key.

The Cr-48 was intended for testing only, not retail sales. Google addressed complaints that the operating system offers little functionality when the host device is not connected to the Internet. The company demonstrated an offline version of Google Docs running on Chrome OS and announced a 3G plan that would give Chrome OS users 100 MB of free data each month, with additional paid plans available from Verizon.

About 60,000 Cr-48s were distributed to testers and reviewers in early December 2010. Reviews of Chrome OS running on the Cr-48 in mid-December 2010 indicated that while the project held promise, it still had some distance to go before being ready for market.

On March 8, 2011, Google Product Management vice president Sundar Pichai stated that the last of the 60,000 Cr-48s had been shipped. The Cr-48 notebooks have additional unused hardware components for implementation at a future date, including a Bluetooth 2.1 controller. The USB port only acts as a keyboard, mouse, ethernet adapter, or USB storage port and will not work as a printer port as there is no print stack on the operating system. Adding further hardware outside of the previously mentioned items will likely cause problems with the operating system's "self knowing" security model. Users are encouraged to use a secure service called Google Cloud Print to print to legacy printers connected to their desktop computers, or connect an HP ePrint printer to the Google Cloud Print service for a "cloud aware" printer connection.

#from http://en.wikipedia.org