This post initially appeared as a note on my Facebook account at 2:15 pm on Thursday, December 16th, 2010. I am re-posting it here both for completeness and to make it available to a potentially wider readership.
I’m going to start my reviews of the CR-48 Chrome OS powered notebook that Google sent me with a review of the OS. I will follow this review with a Hardware Review sometime this weekend. For this review I am going to ignore any limitations caused by the actual CR-48 notebook and only focus on the actual Chrome OS and it’s viability on notebooks and netbooks as a whole.
Startup: In my gut reactions I mentioned that this system was instant on; which isn’t exactly the case. When resuming from sleep the system is instant on, but if I actually shut the machine down it does take about 10 seconds to boot back to the log on screen. Completely shutting the notebook down actually requires me to hold the power button for a few seconds, where as putting it to sleep simply requires closing the lid. I haven’t noticed a significant battery drain difference between shutting down and sleeping, but I haven’t done any significant testing either.
User Experience: The learning curve for using Chrome OS is almost non-existent. The system boots directly into a Chrome browser window that you can’t close. My mom could literally pick this notebook up and have no problem using it, which might not be a bad idea since she also couldn’t break it at all. You can pin tabs and bookmark things just like you would in Chrome. I have Chrome OS set to always reload all open tabs whenever it starts so that my most used sites(GMail, Facebook, ESPN, etc.) are open and ready for me.
Apps and Extensions: Support for apps and extensions in Chrome is currently lacking. Most of the apps that are available are simply glorified bookmarks to a website. Hopefully the launch of Chrome OS will get developers to finally create some true Chrome apps that utilize offline storage and are more than just a link to their website. Extension support is a little better but the App Market is cluttered with a bunch of poorly coded, useless extensions, and themes for that matter. There are some useful extensions but overall support needs to increase.
Multimedia: I think the biggest flaw of Chrome OS is the lack of multimedia support. Listening to music requires me to stream a radio station or Pandora, search for songs on YouTube, or use something like Grooveshark. All of these are great options but break down when I want to simply listen to the Ettison Clio CD I picked up at a show where they opened back in 2004. None of them are even ideal solutions for getting my Flogging Molly fix. The same is true for video. Sure YouTube and Hulu have days worth of video but the lack of a Silverlight Plugin means Netflix doesn’t even work and makes streaming even less viable. There is a lot that I would miss out on if this was my only computer.
Overall I think the platform is entirely viable, yes it has it’s weakness’ but so does the iPad and every other system out there. I’ll save my predictions about what a Chrome OS notebook’s niche is for a later post but I definitely think it has one. I’m going to continue using this as my primary computer so maybe some of these opinions will change as my web use adapts and I find new solutions to plug the perceived holes I see right now. That’s going to be it for now; I need to go spend some more time playing with Grooveshark, for research naturally.
If you have any questions, want more detail, or want to know about something I haven't mentioned feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to answer it.
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