Enjoying my CR-48

When Google announced that they were giving away laptops for testing Chrome OS, I immediately went to the website to sign up, not really expecting to get one. The word was that Google would ship 60,000 of them, but figured they'd probably get millions of requests. I expected I would receive an e-mail from Google if they were going to send me one. Imagine my surprise to find it sitting at my door last Monday!

There are lots of reviews online so I won't go into much detail describing it. Suffice it to say it is a plain black 12" notebook without any distinguishing logos or branding. A stealth laptop! The experience was pure Google. It powers on as soon as you open the lid. No need to press the power button. The first thing you have to do is connect to a network. You can't use the CR-48 without being connected to the Internet. After logging in to my Wi-Fi it then asked for my Google login. Hard to imagine anyone getting a CR-48 who does not already have a Google account, but it gives you an option to create one just in case. The next step is to take a picture, using the built in webcam. I would have preferred if it just used the picture from my Google Profile. Currently there is no way to change the picture, which only shows on the login page.

The next step was a really pleasant surprise. Usually with any new computer you're faced with hours of setup and customization to get things the way you like. But since I was already using Chrome as my main browser, and had sync turned on, when Chrome came up on the CR-48 it already had my home page, all of my bookmarks, even extensions, apps, and my theme. I was right at home and could just start using it immediately.

If you already do most of your stuff on the web, then having a browser only computer is no big deal. As I mentioned in my previous post about Chrome OS, I also spend a lot of time in a shell, accessing remote hosts over SSH, and in a text editor writing code. At least the CR-48 provides one of those functions. If you press ctrl-alt-t it slides over to a text console with a shell called 'crosh', the Chrome Shell. Crosh doesn't do much. You can do some basic network diagnosis and approve certificates, and you can SSH to another host. This in itself makes the CR-48 much more useful for people that need this. Of course once you're logged in to a remote host you can use whatever tools that host has available to edit files etc. Unfortunately there is no X11 forwarding so no GUI editors. So while I wouldn't attempt to use the CR-48 for everyday code editing, at least you can access your remote hosts to make small changes. You would think Google Docs would handle simple text files. It really wouldn't be that hard for them to include the functionality to edit source files. That would make Chrome OS much more palatable to programmers.

As far as web browsing goes, it's just like Chrome on any other computer. It's faster than my Atom powered netbook, and slower than my Core i5 laptop. If a site works with Chrome, and most do, you're fine. The only site I need to use that does not work with Chrome is the Plesk control panel my hosting service uses to manage my VPS. It times out horribly in Chrome, but works fine in Firefox. Alas, no Firefox on the CR-48.

Networking seems to work well. I was able to connect to the public Wi-Fi at OSU, and register it on their network. In addition to Wi-Fi it has a built in 3g card for accessing Verizon. You even get 100 Mbytes per month free. That's not much but should at least allow me to check my e-mail in a pinch.

The only hassles I've had have to do with the keyboard and trackpad. I'm not a touch typist, and the key faces are small lowercase and gray on black. They're very hard to see. Other than that I like the simple keyboard layout, and the lack of function keys, caps lock, page up, page down, etc. In place of the caps lock key is the search key. Pressing it brings up a new tab with the cursor in the location/search bar, ready to type. Speaking of tabs, there are no windows. Anything that tries to pop-up a new window gets a new tab instead. The exception is the kind of pseudo windows that are done with jQuery or LightBox. Back to the track pad, it is quite large. I'm not sure if this is a good thing. As one who is prone to accidentally touching the trackpad while typing, smaller is better. I've used a lot of trackpads, but this one is particularly quirky. I had great difficulty dragging a URL into a bookmark folder. Selecting text can also be challenging. There are no separate buttons. There is both a physical click on the pad itself, and a tap click. You use two fingers for a right click. You can turn off tap-to-click in the settings.

Looking back at my post from 10 months ago, when I tried out an early alpha version of Chrome OS, I see that some of my concerns have been met, and some other things have changed in that time. It has only been a few weeks since Google opened up the Chrome Web App store, and already there are some very good apps. So far it's the news sites like the NY Times, and the Huffington Post that have the best apps. But there are also a lot of new productivity apps, like photo and image editors, and diagramming apps that look very promising. In the end these will either make or break any web only computer. Odds are good that they will succeed the same as they have on the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, and all of the Android devices.

When I signed up to get this device, I agreed to use it as my everyday computer. So far I have had no problem doing this. Yes, I still need to use other computers to do certain things, but I can easily spend most of my time on the CR-48. Oh and did I mention that it wakes up instantly, and the battery seems to last forever? I sure hope Google doesn't want it back at any point.