Chrome OS Notebook Cr-48 Impressions After the First Week

Since receiving my Chrome OS Notebook Cr-48 from Google last weekend, I began using it as a replacement of my Acer netbook which I use daily at home for all things a netbook was designed to be for the past week. I can gladly say that Chrome OS has entirely replaced my netbook for the past week without any pain or changes to my personal online browsing behavior one bit. I have been using my Linux netbook since Fall 2008 on a daily basis so this transition was not a difficult one at all.

There are a few rough edges in the Chrome OS user experience compared to just my trusty netbook. In Chrome OS, the built-in Adobe Flash support is not reliable. This has been widely observed and reported. I have seen this behavior in the past on my Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 prior to upgrading to Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6. Flash now is rock solid on my Mac. As for Chrome OS in its current release, Flash crashes often in Chrome OS, especially when switching between various tabs in the browser. An update to Chrome OS that was pushed on Day 4 of my using it resolved quite a bit of the crashes but not all of them. I am confident this wil be resolved as ChromeOS matures.

Flash loads itself OS wide in the ChromeOS so it effectively crashes all the tab instances in the Chrome browser. Google or Adobe needs to fix this and make the Flash support isolate itself from other tabs and pages. Maybe Flash 10.2 will resolve this behavior. Or Google can design a way to isolate Flash from other tab instances in Chrome. This problem has been acknowledged by Google and Adobe and they are working on fixing this as a top priority. "Flash Player for Chrome Notebooks" On an additional note, Google is already working on this "Chrome Adds Flash Sandboxing" so it should be pushed as Chrome OS update soon.

The touchpad tracking in Chrome OS sometimes is inconsistent. This I can attribute to the beta nature of Chrome OS and the Pilot Program. The touchpad does not always track drag-n-drop operations. I am confident this will be resolved by Google in future updates to Chrome OS.

In the browser, there no convenient method to switch between browser window instances without using the keyboard. This is a user-interface design feature that should be easily resolved by the Chrome OS team. I have send feedback making the recommendation that ChromeOS implement a button, right-click menu action, and touchpad multi-touch gesture that performs this function. The touchpad multi-touch gesture should be the familar sweep right or left similar to how the scroll up and down currently works.

On the hardware side, a locking slot (Kensington type) is missing from the actual Cr-48. This is an easy fix on the hardware for physical security. Additionally, an input for external microphone is needed. When I was using GMail Call Phone, this became an apparent need. This is also another easy fix to the hardware design.

Other than that, Chrome OS is relatively solid and in my opinion will be one potential future platform where the cloud is more important than the hardware. The rest of the world needs to catch up to cloud-computing from an end user perspective and change their habits. Since I have been working in the cloud for several years now, the change to my user habits is very minimal. I have been a user of Google Docs since it was in beta and already made the full transition to using cloud services for everything Google Docs provides years ago.

Oh yeah one last thing on hardware is processor speed. The more the better. The Cr-48 apparently contains an Intel Atom N455 1.66Mhz chip which I think is sufficient for netbooks but not a notebook. With the larger 12.1" display, a much faster processor is needed. Especially for handling the fullscreen video. Or maybe integration of faster GPU such as NVidia, AMD, or others. This type of hardware is already on the market so as Chrome OS nears public launch sometime in 2011, I am sure the publicly available devices from various manufacturers will meet this requirement.

Chrome OS as a netbook replacement is a no-brainer. As a notebook, well there some things that Chrome OS can not replace yet. If you are doing any type of development work (applications, multimedia authoring, music editing, etc.) then Chrome OS is not yet mature enough to handle these functions in my opinion. The potential is there but the reality is that cloud services and tools are not. For instance, there is no Eclipse or NetBeans for the cloud IDE yet. Cloud development IDEs are beginning to emerge (i.e., Cloud2Code) and other tools such as Pixlr, Picnik, Creately are making serious progress for the cloud tools marketplace.

I have seen others post that Chrome OS in 2011 will be nice Windows NT 4.0 and Mac OS X 10.0 when they were first release. Chrome OS represents the beginning of a shift in user behavior and a new platform. I suspect in about 2-4 years from now it will be widely used as the cloud industry matures and more services are developed. Joe Wilcox over at BetaNews has published some really insightful viewpoints comparing Chrome OS in 2010/2011 to Windows NT4 and Mac OS X 10.0. See "Who is the cloud for?"

As a personal music device, well I use iTunes and have an iPod which is not available as an cloud service. I already have a large personal music collection so using Pandora or Slacker is not an option. Maybe some type of iTunes like services that lets me leverage cloud storage or local network accessible storage servers is in the works. The Apple 'walled garden' will not work for my personal collection of digital music. Sounds like an area for cloud innovation to me. I wish I had the time to work on something like that. I wonder is anyone is working on something like this? Hmm. I am quite sure some one is but just have not discovered it yet.

For personal online video, Chrome OS shine except for the Flash issues and underpowered CPU. HTML5 and WebM stuff all work great. I have tried this on YouTube and have not had any issues with HTML5 video streaming. Hulu works fine... NetFlix is not yet available. For video editing and authoring, YouTube has some nice editing features available now. But for professional level work there is much room for cloud innovation.

If the cloud really takes off in the next five years, I am sure the development community will adapt accordingly. For now, Chrome OS will works as a netbook replacement and web browsing device. If you use cloud applications (web-mail, Google Docs, Pixlr, Picnik, etc.) it will serve you well.