| Google Cr-48 Chrome OS Notebook |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Notebook | Compact PC | |||||||
| Written by Austin Downing | |||||||
| Thursday, 17 March 2011 | |||||||
Page 4 of 5
Google CR-48 Detailed FeaturesThe external of the CR-48 while nice is not what all of the hype surrounding this system is about. Rather it is Googles Chrome OS that runs on it that has many users excited. This is one of Google's newest creations and the CR-48 was their way of getting the kinks out of the system. The Chome OS is a cloud computing based operating system, in which none of the user's data is stored locally but rather stored out in the cloud. This means that users will not listen to music directly off your system but rather stream it, they will edit their documents in Google Documents, and rather than watching your movies off of discs or HDD they will stream it from services like Hulu.
When users start the CR-48 for the first time they are greeted with a very user-friendly first time configuration screen. From here you can control many aspects of the CR-48's operation including touchpad sensitivity, keyboard language (including dvorak), and your browsing experience.
Anytime a new empty tab is opened, the Chrome OS brings up the your "home" page. This contains any applications you have installed off the web store, and any tabs you recently closed.
The Chrome Web Store still has a long way to go, with many of its applications being little more than glorified bookmarks. The potential is there, but currently it really is not being used. Extensions on the other hand can help augment your experience, but even then it is nothing revolutionary. None the less I expect the Chrome web store to shape up to become something very important in the next couple of years so don't count it out of the game yet.
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Comments
Again, I appreciate what Google is doing here, but I have to stick with the pioneers and I don't like hardware being shoved down my throat that I cannot pick out myself. Sure I know, I don't have to buy it. I also feel like Google has taken a lot of open source code out there and cloned software to be like of those that were built by open source communities. They have stamped that software with their logo and because we are so used to Google being friendly we assume everything they do is ok.
I for one will not be buying the Chrome OS PC's, if they allow users to install on a platform of their choice for free or for a fee is fine with me. Maybe I'm just getting old, Apple and Microsoft along with players like Novell and more earned their right and took the bumps and bruises it takes to get where they are, whether you like them or not, you have to respect the pioneers that got us where we are today.
I'm off my soap box.
But hey, I live in Europe where we all get screwed big time.
Also, the "always-connected" aspect of the CR-48 is really taking an unfair beating, IMHO. Is this concept really so new? If you are a smartphone user, it's certainly not, because you already are always connected. How is the CR-48 really any different other than being a different form factor? While I agree that offline access to several Google Apps (particularly Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Reader) would be great, the truth is that I have yet to be in a situation with my CR-48 where I'm truly offline. I am either within range of a Wi-Fi access point, or I can enable the Verizon wireless service.
It's all about understanding just what cloud computing can and cannot do.
Re ANIKHTOS' comment: "Frankly the idea of online storage so you can access data from anywhere in the world is stupid. First to do that i must be somewhere, second i must have access to pc so if i go to another town with my laptod why on earth have my documents online and not and the hard drive!?!??!!?" see the amusing video that Google released when the Cr-48 pilot program began: ##youtube.com/watch?v=lm-Vnx58UYo
It's having all your documents on your hard drive that is stupid.
ChromeOS and Chrome itself are both open source in their Chromium versions, so Google isn't just "taking and not giving" from the Open Source pool.
Several ChromeOS apps work offline. HTML5 (and the dieing Google Gears) has provisions for use of local storage, and apps like Google Docs take advantage of this. Docs in particular will save data on the computer, then sync again when a connection is available.
Finally, Chrome OS will be able to play locally stored music, at least. Actually you can do it *now* with an app from the Web Store called "Local Player", but Google is also building a media player into the OS...it just doesn't work yet.
File access from flash drives is *working*, but it certainly isn't consistent. There's a "secret" screen that you can get to by typing "about:flags" into your address bar. It has a list of features that are in the OS but aren't stable enough to be trusted for general use yet. The advanced file system is one of them, and is what allows general flash/memory card access. I've uploaded pics to Piknik and Flickr, so it works, it's just rather flakey at the moment. There's also a Media Player feature that's half implemented at the moment that should take care of movie needs.
Just give this thing a little more time to bake, and it should get better fairly quickly. Well...it has to if they're expecting to release production Chrome OS laptops later this year!
I have not tried using the system for local multimedia.
How to recover your Cr-48: ##youtube.com/watch?v=UVrI3IyKo3E