On April 12th Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was interviewed and took open questions about Google which included their Chrome OS.

The talk was based at Atmosphere, a presentation to CIOs about cloud computing.

So it looks like as well as Google being very specific about the specs for what hardware will be needed to support the Chrome OS they are also “in bed” with a hardware manufacturers putting together their own google branded Chrome OS powered netbook.

The specs initially leaked over at IB Times seem to say that the machine will be fairly beefy. The rumours point to a 10.1 inch TFT multi touch display (HD ready of course) with an NVIDIA Tegra chipset all powered by an ARM CPU. In terms of connectivity the rumours point to the usual suspects of WiFI, Bluetooth, wired ethernet and 3G. There are also USB slots, a standard 3.5mm headphone sokcet and multi form memory card reader…. oh and a built in webcam. There’ll be 2GB of RAM available and a 64GB SSD storage. We’re not quite sure if this SSD figure is right due to Google mentioning that the OS is mainly to be used with most data being stored in the cloud but perhaps they’ve made advances in this area thanks to HTML 5 offline storage capabilities.

The release time for this is still Q4 2010.

All this is planned to come at a sub $300 cost to the end user and may even come cheaper if bought with a mobile contract in the same way that mobile handsets are subsidised today.