31–40 of 45 posts
"The packaging was fine. It wasn’t Apple quality, but few companies put the effort into packaging that Apple does." All I needed to read. Really, reviewing a laptop on the box? Talk about judging a book by its cover. As long as it gets there in one piece, isn't the computer itself more important?
"OS X and Windows give you a nice sound to show you how loud you’ve just made it, but ChromeOS just gives you a little volume bar." Windows actually doesn't.
Except that it does. Try left clicking on the volume icon in the tray and changing the volume.
In that case, you are right: No sound is played when you set the volume. Probably (I couldn't be bothered to test it) you usually hear one of the sound theme entries, at the new volume.
I'm thinking of getting a Chromebook for my father, and this is a man whose only been online via a library and who has no internet connection at home (or even a TV for that matter). The things I'm curious about are: 1) How is the 3g? Is it invisibly always connected like a mobile phone is, or is it more like a laptop where you have to connect and disconnect? 2) How is the Camera? And how easy is it to upload a photo…
1. I always disable the mobile data when I'm on wifi cause I don't want to burn up my bandwidth. Otherwise I believe that once you turn it on it will connect. (after setup of course) As an experiment, my parents are trying 3G only until they can determine a usage pattern and find that $35/month internet through their ISP will be cheaper. They do travel to visit family and have the 3G as a fallback is great.
2. On my CR48, the camera is only useful for video chat. I never found an appropriate flash based camera app to just take photos. Likewise I haven't yet tried plugging an SD card in to see how it does uploading to Picasa.
3. Battery life is awesome, I charge my CR48 every 3-4 days with light use. Even if I use it a lot, I've always lasted an entire day (but I'm not watching videos or anything like that)
4. The updates download in the background and you will see a little green upward pointing arrow on the menu bar. Click on it and you get a dialog that prompts you to restart now. If you don't ever hit the button, the next time you shutdown it will start back up with the new code installed.
5. The apps are the web app versions so it's not like Android with the navigation. My CR48 has a GPS chip but it's not turned on yet in the builds. It is close though, because people have got the daemon started and Google Maps will find your location.
The other thing I like that I know their gmail password and can sign in to their account and can add apps/bookmarks and it will sync automatically to their Chromebook.
I can't judge how well your father will do but I had my parents using my CR48 just fine. The problems were things that just needed practice: Using the touchpad, knowing how to close windows and recognize links to click on. I feel _much_ better about their online safety with this machine vs windows or mac when I'm trying to troubleshoot from 800 miles away. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss any other points. (email in my profile)
To everyone who says just buy a windows netbook and install Chrome are totally missing the point. Yes, of course you could do that but it wouldn't work the same. If you already know how to run windows/mac and need or want native apps, the chromebook is not for you unless you want a 2nd machine. Both my wife and I have laptops that mostly stay on their respective desks now that I have the CR48. It is the form factor and the speed of booting/wakeup and the ease of switching users. Both of my young children have accounts and they can use it just fine. It really is 'our' computer instead of 'my' computer and that makes it perfect as a companion machine.
Of course this is all just my opinion.
I'm thinking of getting a Chromebook for my father, and this is a man whose only been online via a library and who has no internet connection at home (or even a TV for that matter). The things I'm curious about are: 1) How is the 3g? Is it invisibly always connected like a mobile phone is, or is it more like a laptop where you have to connect and disconnect? 2) How is the Camera? And how easy is it to upload a photo…
1) I don't have a whole lot of experience with this as we were pretty much on wifi the whole time. I do know you have to manually enable 3g in the settings though. Once 3g on I assume it's automatic when there's not wifi around.
2) Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of experience with this one either. The only pictures we every took with it were the initial user pictures, which didn't turn out all that well (although the newer chromebooks may have better cameras). I would assume you would be able to take pictures through any site that cam make use of a webcam though.
3) Battery life was pretty excellent. My girlfriend would use it all day at school for notes. It pretty much goes into hibernate when the lid is closed.
4) This is the part about the review that confuses me. The CR-48 we had always updated silently. It would update in the background, and then when the laptop was restarted it would install. I don't think I ever saw it prompt for an update.
5) First off, there are no native apps. It's literally chromium on a minimal linux build. The maps 'app' that he would have to use is the full blown maps.google.com. As long as he had a 3G connection I would think he'd be fine, otherwise I'm not too sure how much caching the web version of maps does.
I hope this helps. Sorry I wasn't able to provide more info about some of your questions
I'm thinking of getting a Chromebook for my father, and this is a man whose only been online via a library and who has no internet connection at home (or even a TV for that matter). The things I'm curious about are: 1) How is the 3g? Is it invisibly always connected like a mobile phone is, or is it more like a laptop where you have to connect and disconnect? 2) How is the Camera? And how easy is it to upload a photo…
2) Crap. It works with Gtalk video chat seamlessly, and is used for your initial profile picture, but it's otherwise useless for other websites. It's pretty low resolution. It has an SD card slot, but last I used ChromeOS, uploading pictures off SD was basically broken.
3) Regarding the battery life, I was getting about 5.5 hours under ChromeOS for standard passive web browsing (HN, Reddit, blogs, etc), no Youtube or games. Obviously YMMV based on how you engage the CPU/GPU, but I'd say 5.5 hours is the about the Cr-48's upper limit. Closing the lid puts it in sleep mode and it's instant on/off, probably the closest I've seen to a Mac's lid closing power management experience. For the power user: I later flashed the BIOS and tossed on 11.01 with Xfce and powertop and got much better results (strictly speaking for battery life). With micromanagement of power consumption under linux (bluetooth off, throttling back to 1Ghz, 3G radio disabled, no USB/SD devices plugged in, nothing really using the GPU, LCD brightness turned down as appropriate) I can squeeze out almost 8 hours of web browsing and terminal based programming, which was a huge gain for me. I think idle power consumption was about 7.5 watts like that, compare to a default Ubuntu install at around 11 or 12 watts.
4) Pretty much seamless, although I always ran the dev channel, so I can't recall how the public release looked, but I wouldn't worry about a non-technical user, it's pretty much bulletproof, going so far as having a duplicate "safe" partition of the OS to restore from if shit breaks.
5) There aren't any native apps. There's a few custom ones like Gtalk and Scratchpad to persist as a uniquely styled interface above all tabs, but basically it's the Chrome browser in a sandbox on netbook hardware. Your apps are whatever can be "installed" from the Chrome Web Store. No maps caching that I'm aware of, it probably wouldn't make a good GPS device replacement.
Beats me how anyone would use a computer where both the OS, browser, and major applications are made by the same company - a company whose living depends on making huge databases about its users' personal data - a company that is based in the US where the authorities have easy access to your data. The privacy implications to using Chromebook are huge, in my opinion.
I hope you are not using an iOS device then... Given Apple's success, few people seem to mind.
I'm thinking of getting a Chromebook for my father, and this is a man whose only been online via a library and who has no internet connection at home (or even a TV for that matter). The things I'm curious about are: 1) How is the 3g? Is it invisibly always connected like a mobile phone is, or is it more like a laptop where you have to connect and disconnect? 2) How is the Camera? And how easy is it to upload a photo…
1) Setup took several days and a call from a Google Chrome Ninja (support team) between me and Verizon, since the first time I signed up, it went to a crashed page due to checking 'disallow third-party cookies', and I submitted twice. After that, it was seamless, with a little indicator just like wifi.
2) Camera is bleh, uploading to Picasa was okay with stuff downloaded from the Web browser, though I didn't try any SD cards.
3) Battery life was good, though I don't move around a lot with mine.
4) No prompts really, just a tiny little green up arrow. If you ever turn it off, you'll never even notice. It's so bad I sent in feedback asking for them to send more info about changes...
5) Google apps run okay. Offline still isn't here, which will be a major improvement. Docs, Music, Gmail, etc. all operate well, but seemed to suck down CPU time, even going so far as to turn on the fan (CR48 was single core though, the new ones have dual core). Offline is my number one requirement which isn't fulfilled yet now that Google Music is available.
One of the best things I found about using the Chromebook was that I had migrated most of my stuff to "The Cloud" so I could use it full time as my main computer. When I installed a new hard drive in my desktop and reinstalled Windows, all it took was loading Chrome and hitting 'sync', and I was 90% back to where I was.
I'm thinking of getting a Chromebook for my father, and this is a man whose only been online via a library and who has no internet connection at home (or even a TV for that matter). The things I'm curious about are: 1) How is the 3g? Is it invisibly always connected like a mobile phone is, or is it more like a laptop where you have to connect and disconnect? 2) How is the Camera? And how easy is it to upload a photo…
I'll do my best to answer your questions, as my girlfriend was the lucky recipient of a CR-48. 1) I don't have a whole lot of experience with this as we were pretty much on wifi the whole time. I do know you have to manually enable 3g in the settings though. Once 3g on I assume it's automatic when there's not wifi around. 2) Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of experience with this one either. The only pictures…
A forced update only occurs on the first turning on of the machine, presumably in case it's been on the shelf a few months. I vaguely recall having to do the same for my CR48.