Monday, September 12, 2011

So Google sent me this computer

its really been about seven months but its given me a chance to get to know the little device. the hardware is nothing to really look too hard at but that was not the point of the CR-48, really everything about it except the physical storage is on par with most Netbooks out there today, I am a fan of 8 hours of use between charges ( that's 8 hours playing around on the internet) I like that its small but not tiny, super lite, and fairly comfortable to use.

so really the point of this whole experiment on the part of Google was to get Chrome OS which over all I found to be rather pleasant. part of the reason I waited so long to really put any thoughts down about the OS was that I knew at the time it was a beta, and changes were (and still are) being made on a fairly regular basis. I wanted to give the OS a fair shake, and get over the novelty and then let down when the shiny wore off.

the impression I have over all is good, Google addressed some of my complaints and the feel of the OS is intuitive. The look and feel is a web browser, any one who has used Google Chrome will have no issue picking up, if they are using any of the other popular web browser there is not much to worry about. The OS is comfortable to use for about 80% of what I need a computer for and I imagine your average user would not notice the difference. With a 10 second boot the OS gets me online and doing what I want in no time, really the real issue with speed is the internet connection. There are a host of web apps available from Google and a host of third parties, it seems like every day more and more is added and it is harder to come up with reasons I need my PC.

Not to say that the whole experience has been super positive, there has been times I have not been able to do what I needed, I am a student, and finding a web app that supports the current generation of Microsoft extensions is a bit of a challenge. the Atom processor is an impressive piece of hardware however it does not handle full screen flash video too well all the time. on the subject of flash, it crashes....a lot,  and even though its not supposed to when it does it takes every tab with it. you can throw chat windows and notifications in their own pop up, you cannot move it any where and this windows will happily push things off the screen.

Over all I would like to see a few things changed but for what it is I find the experience to be rather pleasant, I am still using the CR-48 as my primary compute; it goes most places with me, and I find it useful to keep around. If a friend asked me if they should buy one, first I would ask what they intend to use it for, but for the right reasons I would say go for it, its a great OS, and the commercially available devices out there look great.

2 comments:

  1. I liked it for travel, but when it came down to it I just couldn't switch for good. I finally figured that out when I couldn't put pictures from a flash drive onto the computer or upload to facebook from the flash drive. Still needing another laptop or desktop to email the pics or something made me retire the cr-48 and keep it as a back up or travel computer. I would really only recommend it to people who use computers just for email/facebook/MS applications, and only if they had another way of getting their digital photos from their camera to the interwebs.

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  2. Have you updated yours recently? they resolved that when they moved out of Beta and added a file browser. it really was plug the drive in and then proceed as normal last time I did it.

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