Today’s article is a leap into the future of Laptops/Netbooks: Google Cr-48 Chrome. Many people who applied for it online got their laptops delivered unexpectedly soon by the courier. Though there are many problems in this device, we’ll have to keep in mind that this laptop is still in beta stage. The driver support and other bugs are still under development and have a long way to go.
The Cr-48 Chrome laptop looks like any other ordinary 12-inch netbooks, but its size is not so thin comparing to today’s laptops as we have also seen laptops like MacBook Air. The body is made with soft plastic and it feels like rubber sometimes. It’s not a device for beauty contest though. Rather it’s a device for early testers and developers, so it should look rough and tough.
At the first moment of switching it on, this laptop will start to surprise you with its boot up time: it takes only 15 seconds to boot up. To log in you will need a Google account though Google promised inclusion of more login forms in the future. The boot time they displayed in the past was nearly 4 seconds, but this is not implemented here yet. Interesting is the time of waking up from the sleep mode because is almost instant and it takes literally less than a second to come back to life. About the sleep mode Google said that you can keep the laptop in sleep mode for 8 days in a row so this instant power up will be a very handy advantage for many.
After you log in you will get the known look and feel if you have already used Google Chrome. You will see the same chrome window without the minimize button. For opening apps you will have to open a new tab which will show you the list of installed apps and also the most visited sites and history similar to the Google Chrome browser. You can have different windows in separate virtual desktop like screens.
The performance of this device, specially when talking about speed, it does not justify the 1.66 GHz Intel Processor. The most annoying thing is that you cannot even see a YouTube video smoothly when browsing too many tabs. Other than YouTube the flash is almost useless in this thing, but we hope this problem will be worked around before the final product and Adobe already said that they are working on it. The HTML 5 video playing is comparatively better though it cannot be said flawless as it still not satisfactory when viewed in full screen.
With this laptop you will also get a 100Mb per month of free data from Verizon. This contract will last for two years. For more data you will have more options to choose from. There is also a meter on the tab to show you how much of the data limit has been used and left.
There is only one USB port along with one VGA port in the sides and one SD card reader in this device. Other connectivity features include: Bluetooth, 3G and 802.11n dual-band WiFi. The battery is good which runs almost 8 hours with fair usage.
To wrap it up, we believe that Google Cr-48 Chrome Laptop may become popular if it’s priced cheap, otherwise it will never be a competitor for other netbooks because it’s too much incomplete. Never say never Google!
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