Chrome Zone was a chain of

retail store Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and t ...

s owned by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

. In its years of operation, only two branches were ever opened, one inside the

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tech ...

located on

Tottenham Court Road Tottenham Court Road (occasionally abbreviated as TCR) is a major road in Central London, almost entirely within the London Borough of Camden. The road runs from Euston Road in the north to St Giles Circus in the south; Tottenham Court Road tub ...

in, London, England, opened in late September 2011, and another based in

Essex, England Essex () is a Ceremonial counties of England, county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the Riv ...

which opened on October 7 of the same year. Chrome Zone sold

Chromebook A Chromebook (sometimes stylized in lowercase as chromebook) is a laptop or tablet running the Linux-based ChromeOS as its operating system. Initially designed to heavily rely on web applications for tasks using the Google Chrome browser, Chromeb ...

s that ran the

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfac ...

and accessories. In a statement released by the Google UK Head of Consumer Marketing Arvind Desikan in 2011, it was revealed that the London and Essex stores were only the first installments of "mini-shops" to be spread out internationally in the coming years. However, no further Chrome Zone locations were opened besides the two in England, and all Chrome Zone stores were eventually shut down.

Features

The Chrome Zone's only products were Chromebooks, which are specially designed notebooks that run

and are manufactured by

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

and Acer, and accessories to go alongside the netbooks themselves. The interiors of the Chrome Zone shops were brightly colored and modern, going along with Google's signature color palette. Stools, which guests sit on to try the Chromebooks, are a variety of colors and their middles are hollowed out. The computers themselves are situated on abstract-shaped tables, with a white underside and a blue upper layer which can also hold the netbooks.

References

Google Chrome Google real estate Shops in London {{Google-stub