Google's Christmas Gift a Cr-48 Laptop
A few weeks back I was made aware of Google’s Cr-48 pilot program, which offered roughly 60,000 folks the chance to get a Chrome OS test laptop. I signed up with a group of my friends not really believing that I would ever actually see the laptop. I have tested Chrome OS before using virtual machines, but quite honestly Chrome OS is boring as a virtual machine, it is at it’s most basic a browser, meant to be portable and meant to be on a laptop. I live in the Chrome web browser on my Macs, Linux computers and my Windows work laptop. So Chrome OS feels like home.
When my friend Alex received his Cr-48 laptop last week I was at first very jealous, then secondly thought I actually might have a shot at seeing one. I noticed two of the laptops were headed to my zipcode last Friday and sure enough Monday afternoon the UPS driver delivered one to my home.
Let’s start with the hardware, the first thing I noticed was the sort of rubberized laptop body. I like this, especially for a computer that is totally intended to be portable. You never have the feeling that this laptop will slip out of your hands. The laptop is light, with a 12 inch matte screen and although the power supply and cord is not as nice as my Mac, the power supply is actually about half the size of the one my HP laptop uses. I love the keyboard, it feels very similar to my Macbook and is a full size keyboard. I have an Asus netbook and the Cr-48 is 200% more usable than a netbook, especially the Asus Eee PC netbooks. If the keyboard were not full size, that would have been a huge mistake in my opinion. The size of the Cr-48 feels just perfect. Now the bad, the touchpad, it seems Google tried to mimic the Macbook Pro and it just is not happening. The multitouch is flakey and you almost need to split your fingers to assure the touchpad knows you want to scroll and with no acceleration I feel like I am scrolling forever on some pages, very muddy feel. The touch clicking and clicking in general is also flakey, with the mouse pointer sometimes moving and I had to disable tap-to-click because I kept accidentally touching the touchpad and moving my cursor. I have managed to figure out the right click, which feels a bit tedious, by holding down the alt key and clicking as well as clicking with two fingers on the touchpad, again split. The touchpad needs work, I cannot imagine using cut and paste on a regular basis at the moment.
Overall my first impressions of the hardware is that this is a pretty nice little machine and unlike a netbook that is not good for anything (Steve Jobs was absolutely correct) the Cr-48 is fantastic for living on the Internet, checking email, using Google Docs and general web browsing. I would recommend the Cr-48 over any netbook I have ever used. With a full size keyboard and a 12 inch display the web experience is very good and the Cr-48 is very light and portable. As I noted the touchpad needs some work, but this is a test model and the touchpad should be able to be improved with some work on the firmware.
I have decided to spend my first week with the Cr-48 set in standard mode, I am aware of developer mode and many of the options it will open up for me, but for now I want to give the machine a solid weeks use in the standard mode. The first thing that anyone notices is that this laptop is basically instant on. After inserting the battery and opening the lid I was greeted with a Google signon or Guest signon within 10 seconds. I applied the first update to the Chrome OS and was back at my Gmail window in perhaps 10 - 15 seconds. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader and sites like Twitter and Facebook perform fantastically on the Cr-48. Because of the lower end processor, web video is mostly choppy, some You Tube videos were not as choppy as others. This is not surprising since I switched my You Tube setting to HTML5 many months ago. As we all know, Flash is a huge CPU pig and will bring older or lower end processors to a crawl. I am a big fan of the Khan Academy and his videos all seem to play fine on the Cr-48, but do not expect to catch up with a TV series without the video being choppy. Streaming audio via Pandora Radio performed just fine, I listened to a Pandora station while typing this post in Google Docs.
I do a lot of computing at the command line as a hobbyist programmer and a system administrator by trade. I am frequently working on scripts or toying with a new programming language. The terminal and shell available to you with the Cr-48 set in standard mode is seriously locked down. You are limited to 13 commands, thankfully one of them being ssh so that at least I could connect to a shell I can work in. I am anxious to poke around a bit more once I set the Cr-48 in developer mode, but I will save that for another post.
Over the next week I intend to poke around the Web Store and install and try out some apps that might be useful. Truthfully, if this machine had a little more software, perhaps Vim and the bash shell and a little more computing power to run video on sites like Hulu faster I could see me using the machine all the time. Basically being able to do some development on the machine would make it very interesting to me. The Cr-48 would likely meet a large percentage of computer users needs and be a much safer alternative as far as malware and viruses are concerned. With a little more processing power I could see me outfitting the rest of the family with Cr-48 computers. This would allow the kids to play their Flash games, even the educational pages are mostly Flash and also allow them to view video. Of course this all depends on the trackpad being improved.
In the course of writing and publishing this blog post I messed around a bit on Flickr and even edited a photo via Flickr's built in editor, Picnik. I am happy to report that editing photos was pretty snappy. Without researching I am guessing Picnik is an Ajax app, fully powered by Javascript and editing a photo with Picnik on the Cr-48, something you would most definitely do, was pretty much as fast as any other computer I have used. There was no long tedious wait, a few turns of the gears and I was editing and saving a photo. Not surprising considering Chrome is known to be one of the fastest browsers when running Javascript. Also for those wondering, to take a screenshot on Chrome OS you press Cntl and Next Tab key (above the 6 key). The screenshots are saved to /home/chronos/user/Downloads/Screenshots, the uploader will allow you to move through the filesystem.
I want to say thanks to Google, this is an awesome and fun opportunity to test hardware and the Chrome Operating System. I would be remiss if I did not mention the Cr-48 was free for those of us lucky enough to be chosen to take part in the testing of the Cr-48 and Chrome OS. If you are one of those chosen, the laptop just shows up at your door. Thank you Google for one of the best early tech toy Christmas gifts I have ever received.
