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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

My mom was recently diagnosed with cancer, shortly thereafter her house was burgled and someone stole her laptop and phone.

I bought her the chromebook off amazon and brought it to her. I had to create a gmail account for her as she was required to have one for this machine.

While the price was right, I was REALLY disappointed that the farking camera doesn't work in these yet! Neither does chrome Remote Desktop.

My mom has a tracheotomy right now and cannot speak, so doing Skype/FaceTime/video calls is important for her to see my kids.

Overall, I'd rate this machine a 4/10 based on the limited functionality, the limited storage and apps and the rather clunky UX.

The physical form-factor is really nice, but the thing, at half the cost of an iPad has maybe 1/100th the functionality. I can browse the web and create a google doc. That's it.

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The camera works just fine... I've used mine regularly for meetings via Google Hangouts since I picked it up a month after release.

As for storage, what exactly are you trying to store on the device? It really seems to only be intended for use as a dumb terminal to Google services, and in the current iteration I've yet to find a reason to use the local storage.

My biggest beef is the inability to locally cache music and video from Google Play. I think if this functionality existed, I would agree that the local storage is inadequate.

I think you also get 100 GB of Google Drive storage with the new Chromebooks.

But it's limited for 1 or 2 years. After that you have to pay if you want that extra storage.

What do you mean the camera doesn't work? Is it defective? Or do you mean you can't use Skype with it? And did you honestly expect Facetime to work on it?

I suggest you use Google Talk or Google+ Hangouts. If you care that much about using Skype, I think you can use https://imo.im. I know you can login with Skype, but I've never checked to see if video-calling works.

I dont have the machine in front of me and it was more than a month since I set it up, but I could not get any sort of video calling function going when I was setting it up. I could use the camera to take pics of myself - but otherwise it wouldnt work. I can't recall the exact issues....

It wasn't defective - it just wasn't something that my bedridden mom would be able to use intuitively.

I had the same issue with my Galaxy S3 where trying to get my dad to understand how to use Google+ hangouts for video conferencing was very hard.

Having the hangouts be part of the Google+ infrastructure is hurting it's uptake because most people see Google+ as something they don't bother using because they're on Facebook instead.

Google could do a much better job integrating Google Talk video or Hangouts in Android, and VOIP in general, the way Apple has done with Facetime.

But either they don't care that much about it, or they are afraid of the carriers reaction - but they really shouldn't be. The users should always come first.

I can give you that. Google Plus Hangouts isn't exactly intuitive in any way. I am sure Google would love to hear from you what they can do to improve Hangouts though. Any thoughts?

A random user would probably just use video chat inside GTalk rather than Hangouts.

I believe video chats have been replaced with hangouts (same icon launches a hangout instead of video chat).

I got a prompt asking me to do this the first time when the functionality was enabled, and now all my video chats are hangouts. Makes sense to me, as it's essentially the same functionality + the ability to invite multiple people to the video chat + include additional apps that add to the video chat functionality (live editing Google Docs, for example).

I have to say, I was pretty disappointed with the actual quality of audio calls (not a huge fan of video chatting with friends) when compared to Skype. I've tried many times over the past few years, but Skype still kicks Google's ass in terms of call quality. Is mine an exception to the general rule, or is this true for most people?

Isn't $327 about the same as an iPad Mini?

The used & new price 'starts at $250' but there aren't any actually available at that price when you follow the link, and even that would be more like 3/4 the price.

I'm very sorry you had trouble with yours.

I have a Cr-48, and the Camera has worked fine for me for doing Google Hangouts. I also can use my laptop to do Chrome Remote Desktop to another machine - but I cannot use Chrome Remote Desktop to drive the Chromebook.

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