First Day Review: The Google Chrome OS Cr-48 Notebook
searchengineland.com
searchengineland.com
"Immediately, I realized even if I could get Twhirl to install, this was impossible with Chrome OS. There seems to be no concept of minimizing your browser, much less letting it take up less than the entire screen."
He's trying to install desktop software and minimize the browser in a browser based OS. That he can't do what he wants is central to the entire strategy of the OS.
External monitors increase productivity. Plenty of people use them, and use them with laptops. Right now, this can't run both the internal and external monitor. Google tells me that will change.
People might have owned only one computer (if any) in 1998, today it is very easy to afford many computers and computer-like devices. (You can basically buy two cheap laptops for the price of one middle of the road 1998 desktop.) Am I the only one who constantly sees some kind of laptop (the second or even third computer in the household) in all kinds of (non-techie) living rooms and kitchens? People want to be able to quickly check the weather, the news, that route, their emails and random stuff without leaving the living room.
I can’t speak for other households but for my parents their cheap living room laptop is the main computer in the household. They use it constantly to go online or read emails, the nice expensive desktop in the office gets hardly ever used.
Netbooks running Chrome OS and tablets (like the iPad) are perfectly capable of replacing those living room laptops. In that sense, sure, Chrome OS is a good candidate for replacing certain computers. The key word is certain.
I tried to install Twhirl out of curiosity, to see what would happened. I didn't expect it to work. It didn't. But it was interesting to try. Sometimes you discover things that way.
If you're with the press, shouldn't you - more than other people even - research things?
Apple's iPad did not have such teething problems probably because it looks and feels so different from a conventional laptop. No one expected the iPad to be used like a normal laptop. Google can probably take a page out of the iPad chapter to see how to manage expectations of their notebook. A simple start would probably be to name it something else other than a notebook. The Chrome webBrowser. Browserbook. webBook. ok, i'm probably not good at names, but you get the idea.
Example: I was syncing up my blackberry calendar with Google Calendar. Now, I wanted the phases of the moon on my phone's calendar, but did not want to type them in. I found a .ical hosted on Apple's website that did just that. However, it was zipped.
Now, Google Cal has a feature of "Give it a url and we'll make it work". So, not thinking it would work, gave it the zipped URL in the form of a server call (not a direct link)... and it Just Works.
I then manually sync my GCal to my blackberry cal, and it works flawlessly. If this the kind of stuff that Google people do, all the better. It just works.
- First, chrome OS is still very alpha software - Second, this guy will never be the audience for such an OS.
This certainly leaves the question, for who will this OS be for ? The fact of not even being able, by design, to have two windows visible at the same time is a show stopper for me.
I liked the tone of the review in the end, even if it irritated me at first. The guy is really telling what is bothering him with the os. Some small things, like the screenshot thing, just tells you that this os isn't finished yet.
Some other things, like the files thing, looks like a pointer to me, that google is vastly underestimating the importance of the local storage interface at the moment.
Even if some people don't really grasp the folder model that well (although that seems to be true only for older people now), it doesn't imply that you can take out local storage altogether and have something functionnally equivalent by plugging the "cloud" in.
The major problem i see with cloud storage at the moment is that for most people the local storage is still the link between a space of fragmented cloud storages, and that if you remove it, it really makes things harder more than easier.
You cannot have multiple windows on most mobile devices. Or TV's. People live fine with it.
Quick question: if you can split into two windows, why not 4? 8? Then you end up with a Window-based UI, which is more complicated than simple tab-based.
It is very limiting, but I don't think normal people who just check their emails and Facebook updates would find annoying.
My point is the design of Chrome OS doesn't seem to have superusers in mind.
Screenshot functionality is there, though. It's just pretty hard to discover unless you visit help.
The other issue Danny was encountering was that Wordpress uses a flash based file upload widget. When flash opens a choose file dialog it opens a GTK-like full system browser. The standard Chrome OS file browser that comes up when you hit a HTML file input is much simpler and would've made the screenshots easier to find.
It's a little odd that it wouldn't allow you to install Chrome extensions from outside of the market
The external harddrives probably DID work, and would show him images if he used something that required browsing for them
As much as I hate to admit it, he's right about iTunes. Who with an iP{{o,a}d,oop} would be able to use this thing alone as primary pc?
How do floating pop up type windows work? I.e. clicking the pop out button on google chat, or hulu
For a web-centric machine, those 3g plans seem a little towards the expensive side, with pretty low data allowances. But on the other hand, I don't really know how many bytes "regular browsing" accumulates in a month.
Extensions will work if they don't use some API thingee (that's the technical term) that Google doesn't find secure enough. Don't have my notes, but NP/API? Anyway, most of the stuff in the market they tell me should be fine -- but even there, not all of it will be, guaranteed, I was told. In short, Chrome in Chrome OS is not exactly the same as the Chrome browser.
On iTunes, we'll all be using music from the cloud. Seriously -- my second day interview with them will get into this. Maybe so. But if you're into Apple devices, you're still going to need iTunes.
On 3G, I have a 5GB plan that I've used for years. Never gone over my limit. But, I only use it for when I'm traveling, about 5 days or so per month. If this was your main plan, expensive. But Google positions it as something you can use if you're out and away from WiFi.
I think the main use case is really outside work, those that just want to use things like facebook/twitter and various chat platforms. Although the netbook is really the wrong form factor, you really either want a tablet or something closer to the air. With the netbook it feels like they are giving everything you can do on a regular computer but then ripping most of it out via software.
Maybe they didn't have tablets for this pilot thing.
If they made dealing with a camera easier I could easily see my mother adjusting to this style. And in the end it'd be easier on my father and her.
Also, I think this isn't necessarily a bad test of what happens if you push the cloud concept to the extreme. Personally I'm more a hybrid kind of guy, where some things make sense "in the cloud" and some things make sense locally and am a bit skeptical about pushing the cloud "too far" just because it's convenient for a company, rather than necessarily the user, but YMWV. (Though, actually, the fact that YMWV is actually part of my point, that the balance lies in different places for different people and 100% cloud is rarely the solution.)