Anyone using new Google Chrome OS?

The thing about the whole Google thingy is... who the hell is the intended customer? You can't do ANY serious Word Processing in the Doc software... same goes for Open Office, it still sucks after all these years, especially when compared to Microsoft Word.. so you have all these people that have the position of "anything but Microsoft" all clamoring to have Linux and Google stuff and it's just pretty crappy stuff when you get down to it... If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and smells like shit, it's shit...

I use Google docs for notes... I make a document for anything I'm researching, I can hit the Ctrl +M and insert the date and time and make notes while I'm trying to clarify something.. and the Google Calender... well that sucker works, I do like that app, my calendar is not something that I worry about anybody else that is not supposed to have access looking at so having it in the clouds and having it hit my inbox with heads-up emails is great...

Google docs with regard to any serious work, well they are a free data backup, just copy and paste your Word document into a Google Doc and you have offsite backup.. but your formatting gets screwed up, so they are a cheap and crappy offsite backup, I do appreciate the cheap part but not the crappy part...

With regard to the Google OS, it's Linux!! It's a warmed over Linux thingy that runs a notebook that has Google Chrome as it's desktop!! Basically I'd rather have a Samsung Galaxy Tab, especially if the cell phone capability was not disabled in the US... if Google wants to have a product that people might actually want, they should make a clone of a Galaxy Tab with a Cell Phone chipset in it and market it through one of the Cell Phone companies... or maybe even become a Cell Phone company, for on the go stuff a browser is great, it's not your basic tool for doing office work or producing business documents...

I have not played with VOIP telephony yet, if that works ok then a 3G Google clone of a Galaxy Tab that does VOIP.. that is something I might want, maybe Google should look at becoming a VOIP replacement for hardware like the Galaxy Tab...
 
Quote from Eight:

The thing about the whole Google thingy is... who the hell is the intended customer? You can't do ANY serious Word Processing in the Doc software... same goes for Open Office, it still sucks after all these years, especially when compared to Microsoft Word.. so you have all these people that have the position of "anything but Microsoft" all clamoring to have Linux and Google stuff and it's just pretty crappy stuff when you get down to it... If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and smells like shit, it's shit...

I use Google docs for notes... I make a document for anything I'm researching, I can hit the Ctrl +M and insert the date and time and make notes while I'm trying to clarify something.. and the Google Calender... well that sucker works, I do like that app, my calendar is not something that I worry about anybody else that is not supposed to have access looking at so having it in the clouds and having it hit my inbox with heads-up emails is great...

Google docs with regard to any serious work, well they are a free data backup, just copy and paste your Word document into a Google Doc and you have offsite backup.. but your formatting gets screwed up, so they are a cheap and crappy offsite backup, I do appreciate the cheap part but not the crappy part...

With regard to the Google OS, it's Linux!! It's a warmed over Linux thingy that runs a notebook that has Google Chrome as it's desktop!! Basically I'd rather have a Samsung Galaxy Tab, especially if the cell phone capability was not disabled in the US... if Google wants to have a product that people might actually want, they should make a clone of a Galaxy Tab with a Cell Phone chipset in it and market it through one of the Cell Phone companies... or maybe even become a Cell Phone company, for on the go stuff a browser is great, it's not your basic tool for doing office work or producing business documents...

I have not played with VOIP telephony yet, if that works ok then a 3G Google clone of a Galaxy Tab that does VOIP.. that is something I might want, maybe Google should look at becoming a VOIP replacement for hardware like the Galaxy Tab...
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Interesting points. I like Linux but I do agree its limiting. I have only used open office just to try it. Cloud computing has alot of benefits IMO, if they get the security issues addressed. Never used a Galaxy and I like skype very much.
 
I saw an article today about how the Chrome notebooks might be great for primary schools to have one laptop per kid.. that makes some sense, they would have the docs and Google search and they could get some things done with that...
 
I share my google calendar with my wife... so I know when and where I have to be for kids sports.

I use google checkout for some customers
google analytics for my websites
google local to bring in a bunch of business
google docs to share docs with client or customers
google docs to break down a pdf for cut and paste
google docs for backup of non confidential things
google docs to send forms to clients (again mostly info about things that are in public records).

I am concerned because I use gmail and and android phone.

I am using Chrome for typing this... its pretty good but I prefer firefox.

Google has become what I was scared microsoft would become but I use it because it is very efficient. Google anlytics and google local are very sweet things. My android phone is far better than my blackberry. I will not be surprised when google becomes a trading app.

Google navigation on my phone is so good... I am sure they must be planning to be Car software someday.
 
Woo hoo, Christmas just came early! UPS dropped off the Cr-48 laptop at my front door :D. I signed up for the pilot weeks ago and never heard from Google so I wasn't expecting one at all.

It is very easy to setup and is lightning quick booting up. From what I've seen it is performing slower than Chrome browser on my laptop. I am not sure why this is and need to do some more testing with it. It might have to do with Javascript execution because some sites are noticeably faster than others.

There appears to also be an issue with Flash and I've had to restart a couple of times to get videos to play. They finally appear to be working but this is very much still a beta product.

Haven't really had much time to use it but will post some more impressions once I have. I'm not sure this will be very applicable to trading but for around the house and on trips this thing could really be handy rather than dragging around a full sized laptop.
 
I had some more time to play with the Cr-48. I put it into developer's mode by taking out the battery and flipping a switch hidden by some black tape. Once that is done it will reset itself and go back into a factory default mode. By doing this you can get access to root and do what you want. I was able to use ssh and get back and forth from different computers and even run some X11 apps remotely and display them on the Cr-48.

There is even a way to run Ubuntu Linux directly on it with a dual-boot setup but I'm probably not going to do that now that it will run a full ssh client and is pretty usable even if it is still mostly locked down.

The network speed issue seems to be not be as noticeable as before. The one thing that I can't really get used to is the mouse setup. It comes with a clickpad mouse which is really not the best. I'm sure the retail versions of this device will be much better hardware configurations than this. I am really impressed with the battery life on it though. I have been using this all day without a charge and still have a couple of hours remaining of battery. You could easily do a long road trip with one of these with just one charge.

I'm not so sure I would be that thrilled with this device though if it weren't for developers mode because you are very limited in what you can do with it but if your aim is just getting on the web it is probably ok. It does have a limited command shell even outside of developers mode by typing CTRL + ALT + T which brings up 'crosh'... Google's version of a secure command shell. This offers limited commands but if you are a power user you will not be too satisfied with just using crosh.

All in all it is a good netbook and more functional than I thought it would be at first.
 
Another tip to improve network performance under Chrome OS is to set your wireless router to WPA2 security only and use AES encryption instead of TKIP. I made these changes and pages are loading twice as fast now. WEP apparently doesn't perform well either. I'm sure that these issues will be fixed once it is a commercial product (hopefully).
 
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