Once I was told I have a large package awaiting me at home, I didn’t even think twice about it, but as soon as I got home for the day and remembered it, I went over to it and saw the return address: “Outer Loop, Louisville, Ky”.
The address looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember why… then all of a sudden it hit me. Had I really just received a Cr-48?? I tore open the box and confirmed that I had.
After the initial shock had worn off, I took the notebook out of the box and was just admiring it’s plain black rubberized finish. I’ve always had a thing for plain mattes, and it seems society is now catching up with me and bringing it into modern styles. I love it 🙂
Included in the box was a large sheet of vinyl decals to put on the notebook – something that Google just started including recently, according to Engadget. Although I thought about putting some decals on, I think I’m going to leave it plain, as it suites my tastes better.
Opening the notebook, you could tell it has a very sturdy and rigidly designed mech… something missing from many of yester-year’s laptops. The black matte is strewn across the laptop on every inch of viewable surface, both on the outside and the inside of the lid. I would go as far as saying the design is ALMOST Mac-like, in terms of minimalism and simplicity. Bottom line: it’s pretty as hell 🙂
Once I popped the battery into it, the laptop immediately booted to a screen asking me which wireless connection to use. I was at home, so I just chose my access point. After putting in the wireless key, the next thing the Cr-48 did was update itself. It was a quick and almost seamless update. All I saw was a progress bar and a title. No user interaction required; just as this type of process should be.
After the update, I was immediately greeted to the Getting Started page, which walked me through the basic and hardware-specific features of Chrome and the Cr-48. After only a minute or so into using this, I came to the realization of what Chrome OS (Chromium?) really is. It is simply the Chrome browser, without the option of closing. The entire operating system front end is basically just an internet browser. At first, this made me cringe a little, since when most products have their own proprietary operating system GUIs, they always fail in some major way – but almost instantly after thinking that, I told myself that I was looking at a Google product, and that brought me back pretty quickly. The ability to update over the air at any time is what is setting internet devices apart from the crappy products that existed only years ago.
Since I already live my life on the internet, the concept of working on the cloud is not new to me, and I completely understand both the pros and cons of doing so. Hopefully the Cr-48 will make itself useful in my life. (I’m already pretty sure it’s going to)
0_0 You lucky dog you!
I sent in to receive one, but no luck or response from google yet. D:
Completely agree. You lucked out. I still have yet to hear on whether or not I’ll be just as lucky… here’s hoping that SeiRruf and I both get one as well.
Just a note since you seem confused, Chromium is the open source version of Chrome. Before Chrome went beta the only versions available were Chromium builds. The only difference between the Chromium stable and the Chrome stable are a few statistic recording things for Google are behind a proprietary wall.
My guess is that they haven’t put any proprietary closed stuff into Chrome OS yet so it is still completely open source thus Chromium OS. When it ships with different computers from different manufacturers it will probably have a few closed off parts of the OS for different things and will thus be Chrome OS.
Anyway, keep us updated on it. I’m really interested and hope this little experiment works for Google.
I got one. But you already know that 😛