Observations on Chromebook

As mentioned in an earlier post we've recently taken delivery of a Samsung Series 5 Chromebook. I'd decided on this platform as the unit was mainly for use by my daughter. I wanted something abit more versatile than an iPad, it unfortunately also needed to play flash for a site her school uses. I didn't want to inflict windows on her cause she's a good girl :-).. I ideally I was looking for a secondhand Macbook Air or late model Macbook, but they started at roughly twice the price of a Chromebook series 5 (not 550).
  So we've had it for about 4 days now and I've made time to use it extensively. Here's my thoughts.....

I'd tried Chrome OS or rather Chromium in a Parallels VM sometime ago and it appeared to be an OS comprised solely of the Chrome Browser. I along with many others was remarkably unimpressed and moved on... When I unpacked the Chromebook I found an OS that had obviously moved on somewhat from the VM experience but was still pretty much the same. I figured their would be some updates so I switched update mode to grab any available beta builds and a shortime later a popup asked me to reboot to apply the updates. I did so and BOOM... A very different experience. A proper app launcher, easier access to local and Google Drive storage. better multi user experience of which more later.

After applying all updates I'm currently running 22.0.1229.33 beta of Chrome OS. It's a much fuller OS than the one you may have seen before. Apps can now run in a windowed area so the experience is much more like Windows or even OSX. Many more apps have an offline mode such as Google Apps and Gmail so you can actually be somewhat productive with no Internet. It is not yet a valid OS for all users. No one wanting to work in any serious way with Audio or Video would choose Chrome OS, However it does handle cloud storage better than any other OS I've worked with and I'm enjoying using it for social networks and Blogging which I feel is what Google have in mind anyway.

The Chromebook we have is the earlier Series 5 as opposed to the current Series 5 550 (strange model naming imo..) It has a Dualcore Atom CPU as compared to a Dualcore Celeron in the 550 and I understand why Samsung have change to the more powerful Processor line. With a normal (7 - 8) of tabs open in Chrome things begin to bog down. Scrolling becomes 'lumpy' and your soon reaching to close a few un needed tabs. I'm very keen to try a 550 as I've seen it mentioned in reviews that this handles the OS in a much more fluid fashion. This one handles You-tube and everything my daughter requires just fine though.

One of the things I've had to experiment with has been how to get my Daughters films available to her as theirs obviously no itunes support unfortunately and Google doesn't appear to have an equivalent of Apple's itunes TV program and Film support as far as hosting the media locally. Lots of streaming options too. I found a couple of Apps that suggested they could play local media files but none appeared to work with any reliability and would be in now way workable for my Daughter. So what do we have? We have great Google Drive support is what. Drive incorporates a sharing facility where you can share selected media with another Drive user. As all my Daughters films are ripped from DVD's we have purchased, I uploaded a test film to my Drive account which I have expanded to 80Gb. I then shared the film to my Daughters Google account and when logged into the Chromebook and opened her Drive I saw the film in the shared section. This then streamed perfectly from the Drive browser window by just opening another Chrome tab. It will do just fine for now. Hopefully Google will either create a more elegant cloud video solution, or add something to Drive to facilitate this, or even better add proper support for local media playback such as twonky or similar.

To be continued....