Hands-On With Google's Cr-48

adeelarshad82 writes "While Google has made it clear that Cr-48 is nothing more than a test prototype, it was interesting to see the machine Google used to demonstrate Chrome OS. Out of the box, the Cr-48 conjures images of the Black Apple MacBook, from the plain, rubberized chassis to what looks like the same chiclet-style keyboard. The 12-inch notebook weighs about 3.8lbs and comes with a clickpad which recognizes one finger as a left click, while a two-finger tap triggers a right-click function. The laptop obviously contains a hard drive for storing backup data, but the capacity is unknown. The notebook comes with a lone USB port on the right side, which has limited functionaly. For now, thumb drives, hard drives, cameras, printers and other USB peripherals do not work with Cr-48. Google is working on getting its Chrome OS to recognize storage drives, but it's a work in progress. Once Chrome OS does recognize storage drives, users can probably install other OSes on Cr-48 for fun. Video playback seems to struggle with Hulu videos, while YouTube clips were okay. The device operates at a 1,280x800 resolution, which means the Cr-48 can theoretically support 720p video playback, but the videos were capped at 480p." Engadget posted photos a Cr-48 teardown if you'd like a look at its guts. An article at InfoWorld suggests Google needs to work on the cloud offerings underpinning the device.

Comments

Huh?

[The MAZZTer]

Unknown capacity? I checked the about:system logs, although I have a hard time reading them, it seems to indicate sda1 is 16gb in size. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

Also I think I was able to get 720p; I'm not sure. But it's easy to check, I'm sure you can try lowering your desktop res and seeing if YouTube caps the resolution. But I doube it.

Re:Timing...

[RobertM1968]

I for one never ever ever want to go back to managing and maintaining contacts on a damn cell phone again. Much rather be able to add them "to the cloud" and edit/change them from my PC/phone/whatever from "the cloud" - and replace my phone with another Android based phone (hey, my G1 is definitely up for retirement) and need do nothing but log in. Same goes for a variety of other Google Services.

I like the cloud for contacts and calendar, too. But, I dont' want to give Google any more info on me than they already have.... so I am running a Zimbra server that lets me push stuff to my phone. Giving Google full control over all my info, documents, and apps, does not sound like a good time to me.

And why can't you use your own cloud servers? I'm only a half decent programmer, but I know how to use both dedicated/our own cloud servers AND link what data I need/want to through Google's services for where there's overlap (like contacts, maps, docs, picasa, etc). It's very very easy. All the APIs are in place. Anyone with just a little programming skill can do it.

Heck, you can even run your own versions of Google's services to "disconnect" from them yet still run the same services solely for you and/or your customers.