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Samsung Chromebook Series 5 Review
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister takes an in-depth look at the Samsung Chromebook Series 5 3G and finds the device comparatively lackluster. 'The Chromebook is lightweight and inexpensive, and it offers a full-featured Web browsing experience. But its low-end hardware, lack of versatility, and primitive support for commonplace computing tasks such as printing, file management, networking, and media playback make it a poor choice for everyday use, particularly in a business setting,' McAllister writes. 'All in all, the Samsung Series 5 is an average-quality netbook with a large screen and a higher-than-average price tag, while Chrome OS itself feels more like a proof-of-concept project whose time has not yet come.'"
No shit
I've had my Samsung Chromebook for about a week now and I absolutely love it. It brings an immediacy to the 'net that I have never experienced with any other computer. True, it's not good at the "heavy lifting" you often need to perform with a "real" computer, but compared to the utterly pitiful web experience you get with an iPad, it can't be beat.
Howard Roark, Architect
I believe in a Man's right to exist for his own sake.
Remember when thin clients were all the rage, guys? Remember Bill Joy telling us the network is the computer? It was true!
Well, kinda...
As it turns out, internet access isn't ubiquitous, at least not yet. In the age of 4G smartphones and tablets we'd like to think it's ubiquitous, but you really only notice that it's not when you have a system like a Chrome OS laptop that literally does not function at all without a network connection.
Even if it were available all the time (airplanes, underground, in the wilderness) it's still not fast enough. And even if it were fast enough, presently we have to deal with usage caps.
Chrome OS is an idea way too far ahead of its time. Right now there's no reason to ditch native software that works perfectly well.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
The issue with this "Chromebook", from my perspective, is that it manages to be as or more expensive(and no better in terms of battery life or weight/build quality) than an equivalent netbook/cheapie laptop.
If I can save money by buying something else and just running Chrome in full screen on Ubuntu or something, or don't get it.
I find Google's experiment conceptually interesting, and its continued evolution will be something to see; but in its present state(while I wouldn't turn a free one down) it doesn't seem to be worth any premium over whatever netbook is winning the knife-fight-in-a-telephone booth on price/performance today, just running a web browser most of the time.
Im honestly not sure why theyre bothering. Android is already a well-known product with lots of support, applications and users, and is itself based on linux. Id much rather see them implement controls and whatever else they think makes chrome special into android, along with a good browser with features. It bugs me that chrome is such a good browser, and that they have an OS based on it, but that the stock android browser is so mediocre.
Cant see myself ever wanting a chrome book. An android notebook like the transformer? Maybe, if the app support improved and a few key features im interested in got added. I love my android phone and rooted nook color.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
It's the answer to a question no one even thought to ask.
Whatever resources Google has put into ChromeOS should be diverted to Android.
...use this thing on a train in the middle of nowhere where there's no wireless access?
Frankly, my netbook was much cheaper, has a real operating system (Debian) and I can use it offline.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
Doing (almost) everything on a Chromebook takes some readjustment. The idea of using cloud apps for everything is still new. As far as I can see, the phenomenon is only going to become more ubiquitous as time passes.
The machine is a lot more secure than regular laptops, and battery life is almost a full work day. It also has a nice SSH terminal, if your IDE is Vim. But if you can't live without installable software, you can always hit the developer switch, and install/use Ubuntu in dev mode.
I'll be interested to see how they eventually deal with this one. If I had to bet, I'd wonder if they might take advantage of the fact that Android is architecturally 'I-Can't-believe-It's-Not-Java'(and apparently neither can Oracle...) and certainly no less suitable for browser embedding than their NaCL experiments are.
For devices with larger screens, enough RAM for serious, conventional, multitasking, etc. they could largely take ChromeOS as a starting point, use the chrome HTML/JS stuff for both web/webapps and to implement the various home screens/application launchers/ and other quasi 'window manager' stuff that Android uses, but have the full ability to run Android applications either as small elements plugged into larger pages or fullscreened. They'd need to give a bit of thought to a good mechanism for allowing web pages to modify/exchange data with their embedded Android elements, and vice-versa; but I could see it working pretty well.
There is an SSD on Chromebooks, and you can download things to it. You can also access external memory cards.
Not that it matters all that much for most uses, with the availability of cloud storage anyway.
You need an OS powerful enough to run a web browser with multiple tabs and flash. At this stage the processor requirement is high enough to make the costs not competitive against a full featured desktop OS so your asking your users to cut off their nose to spite their face. Unfortunately the logic doesn't work, not even for dumbo the office salesmen/marketing person. They can all spot the con when they see the price tag. In order for a WebOS to take off like this is basically trying to be, you need to have a price tag of about a 100 Euro at which point, you can't provide the hardware necessary and satisfy the hardware manufacturers profit margin needs. Rock and a hard place unfortunately. Then you have the additional problems of connectivity on top of that. For the 50 Euro extra (not even in some cases). Also, the review shows tellingly that there was never a worse time to kill Google Gears for offline access since clicking your excel file can't open it in Google Docs. A clever interface with Google Gears could have made a short development time frame to get that implemented. Just looks like Google doesn't have a full realised idea here and has implemented the theoretical idea in full without trying to test it properly with user needs when the connection drops.
Which reminds me. Whatever happened to that Asus subnotebook with Linux pre-installed which was talked up on Slashdot a month ago? The models mentioned are only available with Windows 7 Starter.
Chromebooks, at this point, don't seem to be targeted at anyone that reads slashdot. Well, maybe only if it's an IT manager.
I have one of the series 5 laptops and I've play around with it a bit and it has its ups and downs. I could easily see giving this laptop to my mom so I wouldn't have to deal with windows updates and antivirus software. It also blocks her from breaking anything on the laptop (software wise).
I could see some specific cases in business where non-techy people need internet access with not installed apps. This is an easy to manage solution for IT managers. But you lose all flexibility that you get from a Windows Domain.
I will agree, this laptop seems like an experience at this point. With the consumer model I only get 100MB per month of free Verizon coverage, which is nothing (that could easily be eaten up with a single Youtube video). I could be plans that give me more bandwidth, but it's not worth it for me. So I'll just stick with Wifi.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Chrome OS laptop that literally does not function at all without a network connection.
According to many sources, handily compiled in the Chrome Wikipedia page, you can edit docs, view pics, and playback media offline.
I have no idea why people keep repeating the 'does not work at all without teh internets' meme
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Somehow, the "cloud" snuck right on me and I feel like I'm just now waking up to the real potential of it. An example, I was in line at the post office the other day and I pulled my cell phone out and started hacking on my latest project that happens to be in dropbox. And since my eclipse workspace is mapped to my dropbox folder on all of my computers, as soon as I got to my desktop to do the real work, all I had to do was hit refresh in the idea and the changes I made at the post office were live. There's a there there.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I see the pattern now. In another decade, Google will become passée, but the Chrome browser will have become dominant by that point. From here, the new giant corporate of that future era will build an OS *inside* the Chrome browser (itself running on Linux or Windows). A decade after that, someone will then build a browser inside of THAT.
In a couple of centuries, we will be stuck with a giant crumbling 20 layer behemoth with the top layer inheriting all of the bugs of the previous generations. "Hello World" will therefore take no less than 4000 lines of code to work around the bugs (as long as you include the 20 necessary semi-compatible 100 MB libraries), and will require numerous other kludges to implement correctly.
I like Google, maybe more than most, but let's just stop the insanity, cutting the numerous bloated layers of mess, and make the OS (which shock, doesn't need a browser to access the internet!) the base from which to build all else upon. Unnecessary layers are kludges; always have been, always will be.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Im honestly not sure why theyre bothering. Android is already a well-known product with lots of support, applications and users, and is itself based on linux. Id much rather see them implement controls and whatever else they think makes chrome special into android, along with a good browser with features.
I'm not sure why people don't get this - if they can get you to do everything through Chrome, they have 100% of your information. That's why they do this.
It's really got nothing to do with Linux. If you're using Android, you can turn the network off and they've lost their access to you. With Chrome, you and your eyeballs are a captive audience, 100% of the time.
I fully expect to see a chrome phone at some point, once they feel like Android has penetrated the market to its fullest potential.
#DeleteChrome
I have identified the following benefits.
A great performance to price ratio. There is no equally spec'd Windows laptop at the same price.
Simplicity. I understand you can pare down any OS to the necessary essentials... that's exactly what Google did so the consumer did not have to.
Unique "actual apps" that require Windows are actually far and few between. The behemoth - MS Office, Games, Image/Video Editing, CAD, IDEs. Now, I understand everyone is 5up4r l33t and needs the best of the best, properly licensed, most resource intensive "actual app" available to mediate their genius into the world, but there are webapps that already exist that fills those roles. And I'll tell you from experience, the WebApps might not do a lot of this, and won't do a lot of that, but the fact that they exist at all and are marginally useful is an accomplishment in its own right.
Subscriptions. For schools especially... many of whom are already on Google Apps for Education. Small businesses with no IT.
Security. Students and employees won't be doing anything outside of the browser. Remote wipe.
Privacy. Haha, no, I'm just kidding.
"No similarly specced Windows laptop at the same price"? I brought a faster laptop (Acer, dual Athlon at 2.2GHz, 3GB of RAM) for $500 in 2009. Now I'm supposed to pay $500 for a system with netbook-class hardware, and be thankful for it?
The issue with this "Chromebook", from my perspective, is that it manages to be as or more expensive(and no better in terms of battery life or weight/build quality) than an equivalent netbook/cheapie laptop.
I personally think the Chromebook along with the Google Online Cloudstuff has its niche already and stands a real chance at becoming the prime choice for household computing.
The first Chromebook from Samsung weighs 1.4 Kg and is roughly 2cm thick, if not thinner. It fits squarely into the MacBook Air carry-around pattern, whilst costing a fifth.
For those who do 95% of their stuff online and know so little about computers they couldn't find a directory on an Thumbdrive - even with OS X Finder in 'stupid-mode', let alone know where to plug it in and how to unmount it before removal (99.999% of all users), the chromebook is a viable every-day computer.
If has the form, size and weight factor of a sleek MacBook Air, costs a fraction of that, has above 8 hours of uptime on battery, has zero hassles with installation and setup, needs no worrying or even knowing about such things as backup, software installation, sane security awareness and data-migrate-ability. All you need to know is how to log into something on the web, which most people do know nowadays.
For those who know what they're doing it's nearly trivially easy to hack a bash CLI onto it, with all the goodies you want.
Optical media aside - which we all agree will become full-scale obsolete any time soon - this would actually be a replacement I'd get my spouse if her iBook G4 breaks. She mostly surfs, does email and sometimes writes a letter. Nothing you can't do with the Google stuff. DVDs are the aforementioned exception to that, but as I see it Netflix, Lovefilm et al are standing ready to solve that even for the very latest of adopters.
And let's face it: I - and I gather most of you too - would take a Linux+Web based Google lockin over an Apple or MS lockin any time. No?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca