Cr-48 First Impression

Today, much to my surprise, I found a mysterious box at my front door, labeled for me. I had just ordered some new DDR3 1600 RAM off New Egg a couple days, but I shouldn’t be getting it for another few days, so I was very confused. There were no words, labels, or markings that seemed to indicate what it might be on the outside. Very mysterious! I open it up to see, unexpectedly, a Google Cr-48 netbook (the test pilot hardware for the new Google Chrome OS), free for me to use! I never expected I would get one after three attempts and a few months waiting for it. So here is what I think of it after roughly 4-6 hours of use.

Appearance

It’s a sleek little machine, at least for my tastes. It’s about 12×10 inches width and height, very thin, and it can’t weigh very much. It’s plain black, with no real markings, as it’s not intended to be a commercial machine, but the package did come with plenty of cute Google-themed stickers to style it up a bit.

Features

The CR-48 has the standard qwerty keyboard you would expect with two notable exceptions. The caps-lock button has been replaced with a search button, and the top keys (F-keys and the like) have been replaced with more specific functions like back, forward, refresh, etcetera. Personally, I wish all keyboards would replace the caps-lock key. Anyone who has looked at YouTube comments can testify that it’s never led to an intelligent discussion. As far as the other keys go, they are a useful replacement for the otherwise useless function keys (at least useless in this OS).

One often complain about netbooks is that they aren’t very useful without a network connection, and this one isn’t any exception. However, Google decided to remedy this to an extent by not only providing 3G support through Verizon, but offering 100MB data free per month for 2 years for test pilots, as well as other data plans through Verizon. I haven’t enabled this yet, since it requires actually signing up for a plan and giving credit card information (I doubt I’ll remember to cancel the plan after the 2 years is up), but if I find that I use this netbook often enough I might consider getting an extended 3G plan.

For anyone who doesn’t know about the Google Chrome OS, it’s an extremely stripped down OS (built on Ubuntu Linux) that is, for all intents and purposes, just the Chrome Browser (a slightly specialized version, at least). At first this sounds extremely limiting and detrimental, and when you view it from the perspective of general-use computing, then yes, it is. However, to fully appreciate the impact this makes you have to understand Chrome OS’s intended purpose. The most common usage for computers is browsing the web and various other simple tasks like document editing and email. This can all be accomplished within a browser, and when combined with the target market usage of a netbook, it turns out to be a perfect fit, as this is all netbooks are really intended to do. So you can then deploy an even more stripped down netbook that is not only cheap and works, but it extremely fast.

Speaking of fast…

Usage

It’s very fast! And, of course, why shouldn’t be? It’s designed to be only exactly what you need to browse the web and use web-based services, with no bloat, on hardware intended to do just that. On the first boot it took about a minute and a half to set up and install updates, and after that all other boots take anywhere from 10-15 seconds. Going in and out of sleep mode doesn’t even feel like that; it’s instant. So far the only loading and waiting I’ve really had to do is waiting on the network to fetch me web page.

So far I’ve found some very nice web app alternatives to native applications. I’ve already been using Google Calendar and Google Docs, as well as gmail (although I recently migrated to using Mozilla Thunderbird as mail client to manage both my personal gmail account and my site email) for a long time now, but there’s some nice apps out there. It’s nice to have access to a lot of my personal files through the Dropbox site. The Google App Store is growing at an impressive rate, and in fact there are plenty of apps that, for all intents and purposes, are native applications running on offline HTML5 technology (however they’re stored in the cloud rather than locally, since the Cr-48 pretty much does not have local storage).

Of course, on any test piece of hardware you’re going to expect some flaws and bugs, and the Cr-48 is no exception. Most of it’s faults lie in it’s track pad. Google apparently decided that in an era where multi-touch track pads are feasible and common that a dedicated right click button and scroll area (most notebooks I’ve used have an area on the right of the track pad meant for scrolling) are no longer needed, in favor of multi-touch gestures. Right clicks are performed by tapping with two fingers, and scrolling is done by sliding up and down with two fingers. Scrolling turns out to be simple enough, if a bit intrusive, as I’m used to using two fingers to click and drag an object on the screen, which will more often than not resulting in Chrome OS trying to scroll. Right clicking, however, is awful. Whereas scrolling is too sensitive, right clicking is not sensitive enough. I’m finding myself often trying several times just to right click once. On top of this, the track pad suffers from the same annoying issues that all track pads do, where you’re trying to type but you’re constantly clicking somewhere else on the screen, interrupting your typing or even causing you to start typing somewhere else in the document (I’ve had this happen to me several times while writing this post). I’m used to just plugging in a mouse to the laptop and turning off the track pad, but, while I haven’t tried using a mouse with the Cr-48 yet, there doesn’t appear to be a way to turn off the track pad.

The number of apps (both web apps and Chrome apps) that replace functionality that is normally done in native applications is increasing constantly, and some of them out there are both surprising and impressive, however there are still some areas which are extremely lacking in this field. For instance, there is no viable way for me to code on this netbook, and forget anything more than the simple Flash games you’ve grown used to. However, this is to be expected; this netbook and OS aren’t designed for those uses, it’s designed for basic everyday use, not for power users or gamers. I do, however, to expect to see apps in the future that support this kind of functionality in both Chrome and Chrome OS.

In Conclusion

Considering that it is a test piece of hardware for a very new, and very beta Operating System, I am thoroughly impressed. However, the Cr-48 (or something like it) is not yet ready for commercial users. In fact, the Cr-48 itself will not ever see the light of day outside of the pilot program. However, assuming that Google listens to it’s “test pilots” (which they will), I can see descendants of the Cr-48 not only being successful, but being paving the way for a future of casual computing that I can’t wait to see.