It’s pretty cool that a company, any company, would do a widespread beta test of a new operating system for laptops by sending out free laptops to people.
Google has the honor of being the first to do so, and perhaps the only one for a while.
The build quality of the Cr-48 is among the top of the crop in quality. It’s quite reminiscent of Apple’s black MacBook or one of the Sony laptops.
It’s refined in terms of design. No chrome, just a matte black texture. It’s not plastered with stickers saying “Chrome Starter Edition with Google” or “Intel Inside,” though in the box a business card style ad says “If you cracked this open, you’d find Intel.” A cute, kitschy touch to the packaging.
I originally posted to Twitter my initial impressions, one of them being “slow.”
I had meant not so much slow as in rendering pages, but simple things like scrolling appeared to be sluggish.
Turns out it’s the trackpad that’s troublesome. It misreads clicks and has temperamental scrolling. I plugged in a USB mouse into the Cr-48 and was on my way, but for on-the-go use, the touchpad is far from a dealbreaker.
The keyboard is full-sized, so there’s hardly an issue with it.In fact, it’s a pretty quick machine.
It’s even quicker when the setting to display plugins is set to “disabled” or “click to play.” I have it set at “click to play” so that I’m not taxing the machine to render a Flash video that I might not click.
But paying consumers won’t be paying for this particular piece of hardware, so it might not even matter at the end of the day.
The operating system is bare bones—built to run on laptops like the Cr-48.
It features, for all intents and purposes, the Chrome Web Browser and a basic UI shell that allows users to log in to their Google Account and use the device.
In other words, if you know (and probably love) Google Chrome on the Mac/PC/Linux, you know what you’re in for.
A few minor tweaks include: there’s no minimizing/maximizing (because, well what do you want, a desktop with one icon?) and there’s a task bar with time, signal strength and a battery icon. It’s very minimalist—a good thing for a minimal OS.
Google has partnered with Verizon Wireless to provide 3G data on Chrome laptops, which is a pretty cool thing for commuters (using public transportation, obviously. Drivers, don’t get any ideas!) and people finding themselves in Wi-Fi Notspots.
This is especially cool, because Verizon is giving users 100 MB of free data usage a month for the two years they own the device—any more and they’ll need at least $10 (but it’s contract free, so there’s no commitment).
Dependent on what prices the Chrome laptops launch at, this could be an attractive alternative to the budget laptops running Windows 7 Starter, which perhaps are good only for Web browsing in the first place.
If laptop manufacturers are able to execute with such precision on the hardware (save the finicky touchpad), Google will have a hit on its hands—provided consumers are willing to give up on pre-installed applications and go to the cloud.