A week with a ChromeOS netbook:
The first thing you notice when starting the netbook up is that it’s fast. Pushing the power button to the firstboot or login screen is a matter of seconds. It’s the same while signing out or powering down. Oh, and the power button functions as a signout key as well. Hold it for a few seconds and it signs you out. Keep it held down a few more seconds and it powers down.
There aren’t a lot of surprises on this box. It’s basically a giant battery strapped to the Chrome browser. The battery is pretty amazing. Popping the power cord out yielded a runtime of just under eight hours when I first got the machine. A few discharge/charge cycles later and it’s sitting at more than eight hours.
Overall, the hardware is pretty decent. It’s an Atom N445 processor with 2GB RAM. It has 16GB of onboard solid-state storage. For comparison, the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 I just bought had a similar processor, but half the memory and way more storage (albeit spinning bits instead). The screen is really great and the keyboard is very comfortable to use.
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The Chrome browser runs fairly well on this hardware given the size of its CPU. It’s definitely not as slick as Chrome on my Macbook. It can start to feel a bit sluggish when you end up with a number of tabs open. Sites that use position:fixed or background-attachment:fixed are terribly slow to scroll as well. I imagine that future versions of the OS will bring hardware-accelerated compositing to scrolling.
The netbook supports multiple users, but it can’t support more than one user logged in at a time. That’s likely to avoid having more than one user hogging the limited resources of the box. I’d really love to see something along the lines of tab hibernation used, instead of forcing one user to log out to let another log in. Once a user signs out, the state of their session should be persisted to disk locally and restored after they log in again.
I’ve been trying to get used to a world without any apps beyond the browser. It’s tough. I set up Guacamole to get access to a Linux desktop where I could run a bunch of applications that I need access to. As a developer, I can’t really live without a few desktop apps. If there were a way for me to get access to the applications on my desktop remotely, I’d be bringing this netbook everywhere instead of lugging around the much heavier Macbook Pro.
Overall, I’m really impressed with the ChromeOS netbook. It feels designed, not just made. I’m confident that a lot of the issues I’ve seen can be fixed in software updates. There are probably a lot of people that could make a switch full-time to this netbook. I’m not one of those right now, but I’d love to use something small like this for more of my computing needs.
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