So, I've had mine for about two weeks now.
Hardware wise, it's cool by me. I'm not that hard to impress if you keep it simple and that's exactly what they did. They really simplified the keyboard, but kept what people are used to. Caps Lock is fucking gone and replaced with a New Tab key. The touchpad scroll sucks. It's not that I can't use it, it's just slow. It has no acceleration. It doesn't matter how fast you move your fingers down the touchpad, it isn't going to move any further down the page. I thought computers nailed this shit already, what the fuck is this?
Anyway, Page Up and Down are also gone, but that's okay because holding Alt turns the Up and Down directional keys into Page Up and Down. Whatever, as long as I have some way of moving through web pages like a crack addict running from the cops, I'm happy.
This thing has 3g and I've never used 3g before. It's so fucking cool. Google arranged a neat little 100 megs of bandwidth for free a month through Verizon Wireless. You can buy unlimited bandwidth for 10 dollars a day, or spend 20 dollars for a gigabyte for the month. Both plans have their usefulness.
If I'm in the middle of nowhere and I want to download some movies, the 10 dollars of unlimited bandwidth would be nice. The gigabyte would give me more than enough data to make and receive phone calls through the Google Voice for a month. I'll get back to Google Voice before the end of this topic.
Okay, let's talk about the meat. Chrome OS.
If anyone ever reads this crap I post, you'd know that I already love Chrome and I think Firefox sucks.
So, to make this easy, I'm going to compare Chrome OS to using Chrome with Windows/Linux/Mac.
First of all, I had no problem immediately having my bookmarks and extensions working fine with it. The first time I logged in, it was already ready for me to immediately browse. None of the extensions I use seem to have any problems.
Default Touchpad Settings of course had to go. I turned the sensitivity all the way up and disabled click to tap (I think I'm the only one who hates this and all my friends bitch me out when they use my computers, but I hate it.). Even though I turned the sensitivity all the way up, I still wish it was more sensitive.
I'm really surprised Google totally fucked up with this touchpad thing. It's basically a Macbook touchpad, which is cool, but this sensitivity thing is bumming me out. Maybe an update will make it more sensitive.
The next thing I have to bitch about is the sound. Here is where Google Voice comes into play. The audio is managed by Pulseaudio and I think the computer is just too slow to work with that. Pulseaudio is normally fine (I'm used to it in Ubuntu) and it really is a giant leap from stupid shit like ALSA.
Anyway, I love Google Voice and I wanted to use Google Voice with my Chrome OS. Here's the problem: When I make phone calls, Pulseaudio can't keep up with both recording and playing audio. It skips. Like a cellphone in a tunnel or something. So, a lot of time when I make phone calls, either I can't understand what they are saying or the person I'm calling can't understand what I'm saying.
Taking a look at top, I can see that Pulseaudio cranks up quite a bit in the CPU usage. When it does this, I can't do anything about it. It doesn't matter how many tabs or extensions I have, it kills the fuck out my poor CPU. It doesn't happen all the time, though. So I don't know what exactly triggers it. Sometimes I'll be able to have a conversation and watch a Youtube video at the same time.
Device support for the OS is...sketchy at best. Stuff you'd expect to work fine, will do bizarre things in Chrome OS. I have a USB headphone and microphone set. It's a pretty standard thing. It works fine out of the box in everything from an Windows XP install to a PS3.
Chrome OS seems to have the right idea about what the device is. It plays sound and shows up as a recording device. However, when I wear the headphones, I hear the wonderful soundtrack of a screaming Pulseaudio. Pulseaudio is being tortured by this OS. It begs for mercy as my ears bleed from the noise. No wonder it fucks my shit up, it's trying to escape a hellish nightmare.
So, I'll naturally unplug the headphones from the USB port and then my speakers join in in the choir of shitty sound drivers and a dying sound daemon.
I have to shut down the computer at this point to stop the havac. This is one reason this OS was built to use the Cloud though, right?
Some things that work in Chrome don't work in Chrome OS like video controls for certain video players and some javascript does funny things to it.
But, you know, after all that bitching, I can't stop myself from using the OS. I have gotten very used to the idea of surfing the web exclusively with the device. This has the added benefit of allowing my main laptop to have extra resources from not running Chrome all the time.
And as far as Google's plan on getting people to use this OS? I think people would. I think a lot of people would.
Old people in particular love the FUCK out of this Notebook. It's lightweight, has AMAZING battery life for a laptop, the keyboard being simplified makes it really easy to pick up, and the fact that it's just a web browser makes this something that can really be marketed to people who not only are advanced at surfing the web already, but people who have NEVER surfed the Internet can pick this up very easily.
I'm tired of typing. Maybe I'll type more later.
Topic: My opinion on the CR-48 (Chrome OS Notebook) (Read 992 times)
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