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Comment by shasheene | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Chromebook Plus satisfies my needs for a tablet: mainly media consumption (web browsing, YouTube, reading long articles, and watching movies).

1. Incredibly nice screen

2. Gets security updates (ChromeOS devices are great for this compared to the dumpster fire that is Android security)

3. Haven't had any issues with Android support (I use mainly apps like RBDigital, Instapaper, Wikipedia)

4. Works well for movies (I watch in laptop mode using stock media player)

5. No bloatware

6. Really good battery life.

It also has a stylus which works well, but I've returned to paper exercise books for note taking.

I can't recommend the device enough.

My biggest gripe is I need to carry a USBC->USBA adapter to be able to charge my phone, or connect USB drives. They're cheap, but it's a bit annoying.

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>It also has a stylus which works well, but I've returned to paper exercise books for note taking.

So, I'm very curious about this. Were you taking written notes on electronic devices? What apps and devices have you tried?

I ask because a couple years ago I tried using a surface for taking notes when I got into a coding bootcamp and it was a mind blowing experience for me - finally, infinite paper space. Swapping between whatever color pen/highlighter I needed. Throwing pics into notes. I thought time and time again, "if I had this thing in college I'd have had a 4.0" (I had, like, a 3.2 lol)

For me it made taking notes so easy that I learned better. Now it's two generations old and I'm looking to upgrade, but I can't justify 2k on the new model or the surface book, so I'm wondering if you explored other options, or what your experience was with the Chromebook plus.

I've also considered switching to pen and paper but that means carrying around a fuckload of pens and highlighters, which would annoy me.

I switched from a Surface Pro 3 to an iPad Pro 9.7” and found Apple’s stylus to be much more accurate. It’s not a huge deal for roughly capturing handwriting, but the Surface’s Ntrig digitizer relies a lot on smoothing out strokes, if you try to draw a slow diagonal line you can see a ton of wobble as the stroke gets pulled around by the digitizer’s grid.

You lose out on having a full desktop OS when you need it, and not having an eraser on the back of the stylus is an adjustment, but it’s a fantastic device for writing and drawing. More recently they’ve brought the stylus support down to the entry level iPad, so if you have an Apple Store nearby I’d definitely recommend stopping by to try it out.

What software do you use on the iPad?

OneNote mostly. The iOS version isn’t as full featured as the desktop one (it’s more in line with the Windows Store version), but it’s worked well for me. That’s where all my notes were when I switched so it seemed easiest to stick with it.

The built-in Notes app from Apple has also gotten more capable in iOS 11, and there are other options that I hear good things about but haven’t tried.

https://www.imore.com/best-notetaking-handwriting-apps-apple...

Procreate and Autodesk Sketchbook are both great for more powerful digital painting / drawing, I’m personally in the Procreate camp.

I've been using Good Notes and the handwriting part of it is fantastic. The notebook management part of the app is somewhat weaker though and lately I've been thinking about trying something else.

For sketching quick diagrams on meetings I love Linea.

I've had good experiences with the Samsung Note tablets with the s-pen and the third party Squid app (formerly Papyrus). But even this experience is lesser now. The former gen had the s-pen embedded into the tablet itself so you just always had it around. It doesn't do that anymore and you have to lug it separately. I haven't tried a iPad with pencil, but if I have to replace my tablet I'll buy anything that brings back that embedded stylus approach.

I've played with using Google Keep (both the Chrome app and the Android app), Squid and Kami.

I haven't played around with any other devices' styluses.

I switched back to pen and paper because I usually want to continue to use my device with full-screen content while taking notes.

> Gets security updates (ChromeOS devices are great for this compared to the dumpster fire that is Android security)

Enjoy that while it lasts. I have a chromebook that recently notified me it won't get any more updates, after four and a half years. That beats a phone, but it's pretty terrible by laptop standards. You can expect a laptop or desktop with any other OS to be good for a decade or more.

Can you run Linux on it instead?

Not to excuse Google - but there's little incentive for a company to maintain devices past a certain point when there's no financial or regulatory requirement to do so.

I'm not sure Windows 7 being supported for a decade was intentional, but we'll see what pans out with Windows 10's incremental model.

I'm planning to stick some kind of linux or alternative chrome OS on there, if possible.

> I'm not sure Windows 7 being supported for a decade was intentional, but we'll see what pans out with Windows 10's incremental model.

It definitely was. XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10LTSB all start[ed] with 10 years of support, and you can install a newer version on your same hardware to reset that counter.

Something's gone wrong with the core architecture if Google needs to actively "maintain devices" instead of just making generic security patches and shipping them out, with a little bit of testing.

Microsoft doesn’t need to constantly rebuild different kernels for every supported device, which is basically a necessity for Android/ChromeOS because of their Linux base. That’s probably a big motivator for the Fuschia project.

It has far less to do with the Linux base than the shear variety of chipsets with custom loaders needed for ARM architecture.

And anything like PCI lookup on ARM.

Damn it, MS balked at offering Windows on power efficient Atoms. This because Intel had stripped PCI from the SoC to save transistors and thus power.

I suspect that if you were to poke at the ARM chips found in the Windows RT devices, they would be special variants with PCI grafted on.

ARM SOCs are a bit like firing up an old DOS PC and fiddling with IRQ and DMA setting, only that you can't pull the cover off to see what cards are inserted and what the DIPs are set to.

To add insult to injury, it's an x86 Chromebook that doesn't require any of that custom ARM configuration to run.

I guess I’m old fashioned, but I highly recommend getting an x86 netbook and putting linux on it. They still exist, and are basically chromebooks with the crazy google bios removed.

For instance the acer 11” cloudbooks run linux well.

You can disable secure boot. However, if you want chromebook style security without google or the centralized PKI, you can purge the ms keys and enroll the bootloader of your choice without special signing from the distro.

You can also manually enroll the distribution’s keys, I think, but I don’t see any practical reason to do that.

The "crazy google bios" is CoreBoot, isn't it? Why wouldn't you want that?

Current iPad trounces the Samsung in all these categories (except Android support, of course), though, and costs less too. And has a better aspect ratio. And is much lighter.

I initially bought it only for laptop-mode (web-browsing and Google Docs). The keyboard and touchpad are pretty great. The tablet-mode has just been a convenient bonus for reading when laying down.

While I think it has the perfect form-factor for a laptop (thin, light and great battery life), it's not the perfect general-use laptop as it can't run arbitrary x86 applications natively, nor has high specs. (I hope Project Crostini will make it a suitable for some light dev work though). Its touchpad is great, and so is the Chromebook-style keyboard (small tweak I'd make would be a double-width backspace key, but I for sure prefer no Super key and no F1 to F12 row).

It may not the perfect tablet because as you say, iPad is lighter, and the ergonomics of a hinged hybrid will always be slightly worse with a keyboard on the back. But it does a really good job.

While arguably imperfect in isolation, together as a single unibody aluminum device, it is the best device I have ever used. For what it is, it's very very cheap, you're right it may be slightly more expensive than an iPad (and the price hasn't really fell since it came out a while ago).

> is much lighter

presumably because of (lack of) keyboard.

It's lighter even if you include Apple's (very nice) keyboard. And has a higher build quality.

Its $100+ keyboard? And that is still missing the $100 pencil. And you get a smaller screen.

If you want a 12 inch screen with keyboard and pen this starts at $850. Suprise, double the price gives you something marginally nicer.

> double the price gives you something marginally nicer.

But then you have use an iOS walled garden.

It's doesn't cost less once you add the pencil and a keyboard unless I'm missing something.

Samsung also has W10 tablets, and for my use cases, iPad surely doesn't trounces those.

> Samsung Chromebook Plus satisfies my needs for a tablet: mainly media consumption (web browsing, YouTube, reading long articles, and watching movies).

I have a Samsung Chromebook Plus, and I absolutely despise it as a tablet. Compared to my Nexus 9 (which is still kicking), it's a far inferior device. My primary uses for my tablet are watching video and reading comics. It manages to fail at both of those two things.

1. No system-wide support for red-tint (aka "night mode", Flux, Twilight, etc.)[0]

2. Buggy rotation lock - this works very inconsistently across apps.

3. Heavy (compared to keyboard-less tablets)

4. Buggy soft keyboard (sometimes the soft keyboard just straight-up doesn't work in certain apps, so I have to unfold the device from tablet mode just to use the hardware keyboard to type).

I still use my Nexus 9 over the Chromebook Plus every time I can. When my Nexus 9 dies, I'll probably end up getting a Surface to replace it.

[0] There is finally support for it on a per-user basis, but it took years for them to introduce this. And even now, if you close your tablet and have to unlock it again, you'll be blinded by the unlock screen.

I almost only use my Nexus 9 for Netflix/Plex in bed and a few ebooks now and then. Not sure I want to replace it with something that does more than that, buy some expensive replacement and still only end up doing the Netflix in bed thing would suck. I hope there still are some cheap (Xiaomi maybe?) tablets out there when that day comes.

If all you want is Netflix/Plex and books then Amazon’s Fire tablets are great. I have one I mainly keep in the kitchen so I can watch TV while cooking and it’s been great, although I’m tempted to get one of the newer models for Alexa support.

Good response. Sorry to hear your experiences. Given I use tablet-mode mainly for Android reading apps (media consumption) and the native Chrome browser (all in portrait-mode), I don't think I've had those issues, at least anytime recently.

I've definitely had the soft keyboard issues on a lot of Android devices in the past a lot however.

with a Chromebook, you're buying hardware with pre-installed spyware, until you remove all Google services from the OS

2-5 seems surpring. Samsung rarely supports their products and constantly shits all over them with custom crapware.

Chromebooks have no room for manufacturer involvement with the software. Afaik, assuming based on public references, if you want to make a Chromebook, you use Google's reference design for the motherboard, pick a compatible CPU, design your own keyboard (but use a Google approved controller instead of a normal one), design your own case and pick a display, put everything together, use Google's firmware and use Google's ChromeOS build. OS updates come automatically from Google.

Perhaps it's slightly less rigid than it seems, but I've seen several Chromebooks and they all seem exactly the same. There's not even a manufacturer logo on boot.

Sounds like they learned their lesson from Android.

Can you point me towards some information on the google approved keyboard controller, I couldn't find anything except the layout differences on google.

A lot of the Chromebooks have an i2c keyboard controller instead of a standard USB/PS2 controller. I assume you have to put something in that has drivers in ChromeOS. I don't know if there's specific info on that (other than what goes into the other os drivers)

That's one of the benefits of Chromebooks: there isn't really any way to install the custom crapware. On Android they are obviously not limited there and (ab)use it to a great extent. It's really too bad, because I love their hardware. Can't stand the software tho, so I buy elsewhere.

I love their hardware but I will never buy it again. It's disappointing that Google won't be making tables anymore. i really liked my Nexus 7. But Samsung is junk software wise in my opinion.

I totally agree. There was a rumor a couple years ago that Samsung was going to make a "pure Android" phone and I got pretty excited for that, but alas the "pure" experience shipped with crapware and their custom launcher D-:

I do actually know someone that loves Samsung software, but it's rare. I think they'd get really far if they would make it light and easy to remove. I really don't see any disadvantages to that approach, unless they're being paid to include things (which is entirely possible).

> custom launcher

Speaking of this, this is another thing Google seriously screwed up lately. Used to be you could install Google Now launcher on any device and avoid OEM crap launchers. Now there is "pixel launcher" which is tied to the device. You can get the APK but this is non supported.

It is so weird to me that they would create a platform where you can swap out launchers and not leave a reasonable first party default in place. Bad for the Android brand and bad for users.

Here is another one.

I can't stand the plain bland stock Android UI.

To see where I came from, Enlightenment was one of my favourite window managers on my Linux days.

Enlightenment always seemed cool in videos but very bland when I actually tried it. Ugly even compared to what I had seen.

Samsung fund{ed,s?} Enlightenment/EFL development for Tizen, so they are linked in a way.

I find lineage os runs pretty well on my Samsung tablet. Be sure to double check model numbers on that though.

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