Got it Friday. Already rooted and overclocked to 1.5ghz.

In the last post I said I would report back after using the laptop for a bit. Yesterday, I decided to use the Cr48 as my main laptop for the day for all my classes and most of my daily use (when I could). My main laptop that I do everything on is my 15″ MacBook Pro. The smaller screen (12.1 inches) on the Cr48 took a bit to get used to but wasn’t as small as my ASUS netbook I used to use often. The thing I noticed right off the bat was how quickly I was able to get into what I wanted to do on the web. Turn the thing on, type in my user password, and voila. Oh and by the way, the Cr48 has amazing battery life getting about 8-9hrs.

Now before I continue let me get one thing out there; I’m a Computer Science major as I’ve stated before. If I’m not breaking the software, then I’m probably not doing a good job testing the product. Yeah, I crashed the thing many times during the day yesterday. Some of these crashes were really annoying and some were minor, but hey it is an unfinished product and that is expected!

There were a few annoying/odd bugs that I ran into dealing with audio, but I think I narrowed that down to it being a flash bug. When I shut the notebook and put it to sleep, then woke it and logged back in, anything flash related sounded like a Transformer (yes the movie, those guys) and was completely distorted. Didn’t sound ANYTHING like the audio before I put it to sleep. The only way I’ve discovered to fix this is to log out of my user and log back in.

One thing that really pissed me off was when the wifi bugged out right when I submitted form data and it crashed the Chrome tab I was working in. In doing so, I lost a full news post for ESFI World cause this was the one time I didn’t feel the need to copy and paste the body text just incase something went horribly wrong. Dumb decision to make on a beta product to say the least. Another big crash can be caused by browsing for a file to upload (such as an image for a blog etc). No error message is displayed informing you that you can’t perform the operation, but instead everything will end in disaster with ALL tabs crashing and Chrome OS having to relaunch itself (think of how your browser crashes and has to restart… yeah exactly like that). I’m sure both of these things will be fixed in future patches but I still felt like these needed discussing here for my day 1 experience.

Lets talk about my performance experience with the laptop now, shall we? I found the machine to be pretty snappy for the most part until I got to a handful of tabs. It got to the point that if I right clicked on a link to open in a new tab, then stayed on that same page and scrolled down, that scrolling would skip and lose its liquid smoothness it had before. Scrolling would remain jittery until that new tab had finished rendering the page, then it would return to normal. Again, with it being an unfinished product, I’m sure there is room for optimization that Google will eventually get to.

My roommates keep asking me how my Cr48 is and I tell them, “go to your computer, open Chrome on full screen, proceed to use.” Not a whole lot to be said about the differences between the Chrome OS and the Chrome browser. They are exactly the same to the end user, just one is a really simple OS based on the fact that you will be connected at all times. The WebApps that Chrome OS has right now are mostly glorified links to their website where the service is hosted. Only a few (Tweetdeck for example) are true WebApps that aren’t just redirects to a web link.

Tonight I’ll probably flip the switch to put the notebook in “Dev Mode” which will give me access to a bash shell in Terminal so I can play a bit more with that. I’ll do another post later or tomorrow with some pictures.

Today I got a phone call from my mother around dinner asking me if I was expecting a package to be sent to the house. You see, I live in an apartment on RIT campus so occasionally I’ll send important stuff to my house back home. This package that my mother inquired about I wasn’t expecting at all and it was from Louisville, Kentucky.

As soon as I heard where it was from, I remembered that Louisville is where most of the Chrome OS notebooks had been sent out from. I told her to open it immediately and her words were, “the box has a weird design on it with a mouse and some other stuff something about a battery inside… Oh and there is something in the bottom… Says Chrome on it does that help at all?” Great success! I had long given up on receiving a Chrome OS notebook from Google and figured that they were all handed out by now. Boy was I wrong.

I am on it right now writing this blog post since my dad dropped it off for me on his way to work. It will be weird using it confined to a Chrome browser but I’m gonna try it during my classes tomorrow. I usually use Chrome anyways to browse the web on my 15″ MacBook Pro, but this just has a smaller screen and I can’t go outside of the browser (duh, it’s Chrome OS).

I signed up for my free Verizon 3G mobile service when I turned it on for the first time. They give Cr48 notebook users 100MB of data for free every month for two years when they activate the 3G service. Pretty nifty for when I’m not around WiFi. I’m hardly ever without WiFi, but if I am, I have my Nexus One to create a WiFi hot spot for me on my unlimited AT&T data.

I’ll report back in a day or two after I use it more and maybe post some pictures tomorrow.