| Google Cr-48 Chrome OS Notebook |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Notebook | Compact PC | |||||||
| Written by Austin Downing | |||||||
| Thursday, 17 March 2011 | |||||||
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Google CR-48 Final ThoughtsGoogle's CR-48 is a look at the future; it is not quite ready for public consumption and Google acknowledges this but, the potential is there. In the time spent using CR-48 I found that the experience was exactly what I was expecting. In their current form all netbooks have limitations due to the lack of power, and therefore lend themselves perfectly to slim cloud based operating systems like Chrome OS and Jolicloud. Unfortunatly even when running Jolicloud on my EeePC I found the experience to be sluggish much of the time. On the other hand Chrome OS running on equally underwhelming hardware still feels to have quite a bit of pep to it in normal operation. Even better being a instant on system, I was able to write little blurbs as they came to me without having to worry about a waiting 30 seconds for my system to be ready to be used. I equally loved the ability to get 8 hours of battery life out of the system. This let me charge the CR-48 at night and leave the next morning for class without the need to carry around the charger.
Even with all of the praise I have given the CR-48, this product still has some flaws that need to be worked out. The most prominent of these is the need for better support of the SD Slot and USB drives. Out of the box, these are not enabled. Even after being enabled, content located on them cannot be used locally but instead may only be uploaded to other services. Another flaw of the CR-48 is although being a generally a very quick system, the lack of power in the CR-48 can show through occasionally when surfing around multiple Flash or Javascipt intensive sites. Overall, my experience on the CR-48 was enjoyable and has provided the mobile machine I have been looking for. Google's Chrome OS has a very bright future in front of it. Having the ability to move between systems without losing any of users personal settings, having all documents stored on the cloud, and streaming media at your finger no matter where you are is where the future is heading. Questions? Comments? Benchmark Reviews really wants your feedback. We invite you to leave your remarks in our Discussion Forum.
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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