Today I went downstairs to pick up an Amazon package which had arrived, and to my surprise there were two packages waiting for me.
The second package, to my shock and delight, turned out to be a Cr-48 from the Cr-48 Pilot Program for Google’s ChromeOS.
Now before you ask, no, I’m not installing Ubuntu on it or doing other crazy rooting. I’m pretty excited about ChromeOS and the potential for the consumer market. Will people find a laptop which is barely more than a web browser sufficient? Could I? So it’s ChromeOS all the way for me.
From the pilot program site:
It’s ready when you are, booting in about 10 seconds and resuming from sleep instantly. There’s built-in Wi-Fi and 3G, so you can stay connected everywhere, and a webcam for video chat. The vibrant 12-inch LCD display, full-size keyboard and oversized touchpad let you enjoy the web comfortably. And at just 3.8 pounds with over eight hours of active usage and a week of standby time, it’s easy to take along for the ride.
What did we leave out? Spinning disks, caps-lock key, function keys, and lap burns.
The Cr-48 is available exclusively to participants in the Pilot program. Learn more
More information can be found here: http://www.google.com/chromeos/
I opened it up, hopped on the wifi and went through their great “Get Started with your Chrome notebook” introduction. Then I turned it off and switched it into Developer Mode.
Once I had that I was able to boot into that mode (it deleted all my preferences though, so I needed to put in the wifi key again and create a new user account) and load up a terminal. Now I had the ability to ssh out to my server and to see the filesystem. Now I’m sure plenty of people have posted this information online already, but since I collected it for a couple of friends who asked, I’ve posted a bunch of stats here.
So, first impressions? It’s very nice to hold. As the description says it’s light and isn’t hot. The simplicity is very appealing. It has a VGA out, one USB port, headphone jack and an SD card slot. The SD card slot is particularly appealing for me because I can pop the one out of my camera, put it in here, and hop to a terminal to upload the photos to my server. Not sure how “normal” people would handle photos though, upload directly from their cellphone to some online storage and bypass their computer completely? The images in this blog post were uploaded from my Nexus One directly but I will want to take some pictures with a regular camera. The laptop is fast and I was able to run full screen with youtube and pbs.org videos without a hitch (although my first attempt at hulu failed, the sound sounded like a bunch of tin cans knocking about, oddly it seems to work now though…). The “always online” thing that they make so simple is pretty clever, the introduction proclaims that you can enable 3G via Verizon and get 100M free per month with sign up (they require a credit card to sign up), after which you can pay for access by purchasing a plan starting at $9.99/mo. I don’t care for the printing situation, you need a Windows machine to serve the printer for that (which I don’t have), but they say support for Mac and Linux are coming soon.
But what about privacy? What if I don’t want all my data in the cloud? If these are concerns of yours, you should stick to your current desktop. Personally I gave up privacy for simplicity long ago, my home address has been public for years and now my cell phone number is too. I adore Google Latitude and have location reporting turned on in Twitter on my phone. My princessleia.com email has been handled by Google since 2007. Whenever Facebook comes up with a new privacy invading policy I double-check my profile to make sure I’m still sharing as much as possible. I live a pretty public life by choice, but obviously not everyone is comfortable with that.
Do I think the common human will be able to use a laptop like this? I think the iPad is already looking in this direction. A lot of people use webmail already, if they haven’t given it up entirely for communication on Facebook exclusively. In the past when I’ve worked on computers for acquaintances, local data was rarely a concern when doing a reinstall. Their computer use was primarily for communicating and playing online games. There certainly are a lot of people who play installed games on their system and require other software, so obviously a laptop like this won’t work for them. It’s actually the same crowd that I typically wouldn’t recommend Linux to (need that 3D accelerated Windows game that will never play in WINE and the custom work VPN software for Windows? You’ll have to stick with Windows).
And do I think I will be able to use a laptop like this? I’ve only started using it tonight, but I have to say I’m optimistic, especially if they came out with one that was netbook-sized. I am puzzled that they are pushing ChromeOS and Android though. They strike me as shockingly similar and targeting the same market, slap a keyboard on any decent Android tablet device and you’re pretty close to a Cr-48. It’ll be very interesting to see how this all shakes out. I wrote this blog entry on the Cr-48 and I have to say that the keyboard is nice to type on. Oh, and I don’t miss the caps-lock key.
Disclaimer: I applied for this pilot program just like everyone else and am writing this just because I’m fascinated with where the internet is taking us application-wise (plus it’s Linux and a shiny new toy!), but my boyfriend does work for Google.