CR-48 (aka Google Chrome Notebook)

Finally, something worth blogging about. Google decided that my application made me worthy of receiving some free hardware and software in the form of a CR-48, Google's test machine developed for the Chrome Laptop pilot program. The primary goal of the pilot program appears to be beta testing the ChromeOS running on Google designed hardware by collecting feedback from the pilot test users like myself. You should know, I have not paid a dime for the machine and Google has not paid me a dime (aside from the obvious laptop of course!)...so things are relatively unbiased there. Granted, I'm a google addict like so many out there...checking multiple accounts via gmail and regularly utilizing google calendar, docs, checkout, news, finance, YouTube and of course not to be forgotten, Google search engine. Just about the only main category of web-enabled software that Google doesn't have me in would be in the photo management. For some reason I still use Kodak Gallery. I'm sure Eric Schmidt doesn't mind.

I'm considering the CR-48 hardware and Chrome OS taken together as the "Chrome Package". In the article that follows there will be times when I am jabbering on about Chrome OS, and there will be others where I am primarily discussing the CR-48 hardware. It should be pretty obvious in most instances as to which I am referring. When I says "Chrome Package" - I mean both.

Unboxing

I opened the outer corrugated shipping box to reveal a natural looking brown single ply carboard box with some one-color decorative printing on it. I think the design is supposed to be a schematic drawing for a "better mousetrap" or something like that. Either way, it's a pretty attractive box with a plastic carrying handle - which I could see being nice when carrying the box out of Best Buy or whomever carries this thing if it is ever introduced to the "big-box mass market".

Inside you immediately notice the decals Google provides to "decorate" your laptop. The laptop itself is wedged neatly into the box bound by two paper fiber style end restraints and a corrugated cardboard insert. There is very little plastic (handle on box, bubble wrap and plastic wrap on decals) and there is no styrofoam. Ok, get the green message here. The experience taking it out of the box wasn't quite as smooth as the Kindle, but pretty good considering this probably requires slightly more restraint during shipping than the Kindle and frankly, a non-descript laptop isn't quite as interesting as the Kindle's screen and keyboard that you were greeted with when unboxing that.

All that is in the box...

• Laptop: First impression is that it has a nice rubberized non-slip coating on the entire outside surface. It's thin. I didn't measure it, but I would imagine it's right up there with the likes of the Macbooks.
• Power Cord and Power Brick: This is one of the smallest laptop bricks I've seen. In fact, it's pretty much hard to call it a "brick". It's almost just an extension of the cord. Compared to the Lenovo W510 i7 behemouth's power plant (yes, it's like carrying a power plant around with you), the cr-48's power supply is tiny. If it was wrapped up tight enough, it might even fit nicely inside a jacket pocket.
• Decals: Google provides some decorations to put on the laptop. I hesitated. I'm not one to sticker stuff up. Especially considering that the case of the laptop has such a nice feel to it. I may not leave the decal on...it will be more stealth that way too. Just figured, ahhh, what the hell. They sent it as part of the experience, I'll give it a try. Yep sticker is coming off.
• "Instructions": I put this in quotes because really, there are no instructions. There is one card that describes the keyboard layout and it's functions, along with another generic card talking about the thing, but other than that, there is nothing. Nada. Zip. Which is kinda cool if you think about it. They're so confident in the usability of the product that they don't even include a manual or anything - we'll see if this is true or not.

The cr-48 Hardware and ChromeOS

CR-48 is the codename that Google has given the small netbook like device that, as another blog said "acts as the host for Chrome browser". I guess this seems true. It looks and feels just like Chrome running in Windows, minus Windows. However, under the covers there are some more interesting things going on. Google's own ChromeOS is actually based on Ubuntu Linux. Currently, the GUI manifests itself as a slightly modified Chrome Web Browser. I use Chrome a good portion of the time when surfing the internet and I can say that the look and feel of the environment is almost identical to Chrome running on Windows. The only features that you wouldn't expect to see in Chrome, but do see here, are the networking and some other basic settings screens. Again, I'll keep in mind that this is a beta version of things. I have recently switched over to "developer" mode in hopes to get glimpses of some interesting features that are in the earlier stages of development.

The Cloud. Most people think of this device as a web-only machine since it relies so heavily on being connected to the "cloud". I'm not 100% sure what Google's longer term intentions are, but it seems to me that there will be an interesting mix of "cloud connected" functionality combined with offline utlity and temporary storage. Right now, there are very few offline features. No file system access, stuff like that. If you think you're going to go to the start menu and fire up Microsoft Word - ehhh, think again. Remember, there is this thing out there called Google Docs and it is the poster child for the intentions of Google with this netbook. Living, working and breathing in the cloud is the future. Mobile devices, web appliances, netbooks, iPads, and even good old desktop computers...they all live online these days. It used to be a luxury to have internet access, let alone "high-speed" internet access, now it would feel odd to own a computer that isn't online.

Offline Storage? What if you want to use the ChromeOS and notebook offline, you might ask? Google killed the offline feature they had in docs a while back (see: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_docs_offline_support_html5.php), so now what are they going to do? According to that article, they're plan is to introduce HTML5 offline support in the near future. Once you can work on files and not really even be concerned if there are gaps in your connectivity, this device will truly become utilitarian. For now, the only thing you can really do when you don't have a connection is read PDF's that you have downloaded and are saved locally on the machine's SSD drive in the "downloaded files" area. This area is accessed by clicking ctrl-o. I recently made a crossing of the United States and utlized the Chrome Notebook as a reading device for a good portion of that trip.

Connectivity: Wifi and 3g. As a machine that is going to spend almost 100% of it's time on the web, it, of course, has b/g/n wifi. The wifi connection works well in some situations, while in others you are left without a pot to piss in (unless of course you have 3g bandwidth to use!). The first nework I hooked it up to was my good old trusty Belkin RangeMax wireless g connection. After authenitcating and connecting, the wifi seemed to handle the internet well, stay connected without dropping and generally performed well.

The thing that really makes the CR-48 stand apart in terms of connectivity is the integrated Verizon 3g wireless. You get 100 MB included every month for two years. This interesting business move provides more of a 'pay-as-you-go' approach. No contracts with Verizon necessary. Kindle and Nook have already shown the benefit of having cellular along with wifi. You can just buy a bucket of bandwidth. I bought the $35, 3gig option, for the first month since I'll likely be using the thing more often and didn't want to be restricted by the presence of wifi. From a business perspective, this seems like a really wise move on Verizon's part. Verizon seems to be making a lot of the right moves lately, though my most recent experiences with their customer service have been less than great. Anyway, the ability to only buy bandwidth when you know you need it because you are out of range of standard wifi, is a pretty cool feature.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Developing for Chrome OS. The fledgling project has a strong developer community started. The Chromium OS developer guide is here: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide - however, this is NOT the same as Chrome OS. Chromium OS is the open source brother of the commercial Chrome OS from Google. The official Chrome OS that will ship on Google's own hardware (and others hardware??) and is the polished cousin of the Chromium OS project. I thought about spending some time with the developer documentation, but I decided if I was going to learn something it would more likely involve Android or iOS. Granted, Android is definitely geared toward mobile development. Chrome is definitely targeted at the professional laptop user. It is a web browser with minimal other UNIX-like functionality built in.

Promise of the Proverbial "Cloud". Sure, I see the promise of the cloud. I get it. It's pretty damn convenient. I'm a web developer for crying out loud. But I guess, as much as I tried to buy into the "web only" paradigm, I just can't do it in 2011. Oh it's close, and for standard application usage, I think it's there.

When I think of about some of the tasks that have to take place on a machine for it to be viable as your only computer, I think that the Crome package has a couple shortfalls in it's beta state:

It's not powerful enough. The performance for basic web browsing is good. This is obviously something Google thought about in the positioning of this product. They figured, "let's make a killer web browser (aka, Google Chrome Browser) and we'll strip down Linux enough to make things really fast on slightly underwhelming hardware." When it comes to watching video, or even scrolling on a graphics intensive page (i.e. photos), Chrome keeps up ok. I say just "ok" because it's Atom processor does stutter a little here and there. I should probably mention that the machines I'm comparing it against include an intel i7 laptop and an AMD Phenom x4 desktop - both running Windows 7, 64 bit with about 8 gigs of memory. Needless to say, it's up against some pretty hefty hardware and software. Considering, certainly for a beta package, Google is hanging pretty tough.

I can't run enough supported native programs. I still need the real PhotoShop and Illustrator for a lot of the work I do. The best imitation of PhotoShop on the web I've seen is pixlr.com. It feels like PhotoShop and it is actually pretty impressive. For most basic image editing, this might do the trick, but I need to have access to the full power of my machine when working with files that are either high resolution or have many layers. Since I don't have a lot of experience working with the online editors like pixlr, I can't tell you that it's impossible to just switch over to the cloud. I just think my preference is going to be non-browser based for at least a couple of years. We'll see how that space progresses.

...and while the Chrome Package (as I mentioned before, I'm considering the CR-48 hardware and Chrome OS taken together as the "Chrome Package") has it's negatives, it also has some positives such as...

Built in 3g. Following the likes of Amazon (Kindle) and Nook (Barnes & Noble) who both included 3g in their e-book readers, 3g is included. The difference here seems to be that they are monetizing the 3g better with the ChromeOS model by providing a nominal amount (100 meg per month) of bandwidth, with the ability to purchase more as needed.

Nice Screen. 1280x800 pixel resolution. Matte finish allows for good viewing in different light conditions. Brightness up and down keys are conveniently located near the sound up and down keys. Although typically I like the screen on the bright side, sometimes you just need to tone it down for a bit, like watching television and computing at the same time. The screen output feels like quality. I think this was a good idea on Google's part to not skimp on the screen.

Boot up speed, and coming out of sleep mode speed are really good. With the 16gb SSD and the other configurations that Google has baked up, the CR-48 is a great performer. You know how it is, with a laptop running Windows, you just aren't sure what is going to happen when you close the lid. At least that's how many laptops I've worked with have felt. This thing goes to sleep as soon as you slap the cover down and almost instantaneously when you open the lid, does the OS pop up ready to go. Most of the waiting is for the wireless connection trying to find it's mark, though it seems to get to my Netgear RangeMax wireless-g router in 5-10 seconds (sorry, I'll actually time it next time...) - it's a great machine for "looking stuff up" because it's sitting there, it's likely to not be out of battery power, and it pops up and is ready to use in seconds.

I'm grateful that Google has given me the chance to checkout their hardware pre-launch. I enjoy paying attention to the subtleties in the product design process, from hardware to software. There aren't a lot of computer makers who have done what Google is doing. They're blazing a trail to the cloud that might be rough at first, but seems to really be the wave of the future. If they are able to come up with a nice balance of an online, and occassionally offline, netbook running a new OS...it will be an interesting accomplishment and one to take note of.

I am somewhat confounded as to the market positioning of Chrome OS versus Android. Android has a bunch more "stuff" than ChromeOS. It's also, for obvious reasons, "cell phone friendly". Seems that a lot of that rich graphic UX treatment could be carried over to the laptop environment as well. I would be curious to see what the differences in resource needs you would see between the two running on the same hardware. Guys, I'd love to get a shipment of the first combination netbook and netPad device!

I'm sure there is plenty more to talk about that might interest you. If I get a chance soon, I'll post up some screens.