About a year after the 1st Chromebook models were released last year the successor for the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook was officially announced today. The new Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook features several hardware improvements, a major software update and many more apps.

The new model is equipped with a dual core 1.3GHz Intel Celeron 867 processor, 4GB RAM and supports hardware-accelerated graphics. It is said to be nearly 3 times as fast as the 1st generation models, booting in 7 seconds and resuming instantly. The 6800 mAh battery offers up to 6 hours of battery life.

Major improvements announced for the next release of Chrome OS in six weeks will be offline file access and seamless integration of Google Drive with the Chrome OS File Manager. From my own experiences I can say that connection timeouts are a PITA with systems that require Internet access, so this will make Chromebooks far more reliable and usable.

The Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook 550C22 A01 was available with WiFi for an initial price of US $449.99.