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Chrome OS Isn't Ready For Tablets Yet (theverge.com)
The Verge's Dieter Bohn set out to review Acer's Chromebook Tab 10 tablet, but ended up sharing his impressions of using Chrome OS instead. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from his review: If you're not familiar with Chrome OS, you should know that there are three different tracks you can run Chrome OS on. There's "Stable," which is what most people should use. It's the build I mostly used while testing this device and coming to the conclusions you see above. Then there's "Beta," which is a little on the edge but has been pretty solid for me. Lots of people run it to get slightly earlier access to new features. But because I wanted to see what the future of Chrome looks like, I also looked at the "Developer" build. Most people shouldn't do this. It's buggy and maybe a little less secure. Here be monsters. On a tablet, Chrome OS looks and feels a lot like it does when you have a keyboard. There's a button to get to your apps, a task bar along the bottom, and a system menu in the lower-right corner. In the Developer build, you'll find more squarish tabs and a system menu that's been "Android-ified," so it looks like the Quick Settings you'd see on an Android phone.
By default, all apps in Chrome OS go to full screen in tablet mode. Recently, however, split screen was rolled out. You tap the multitasking button on the lower right, drag one window to the left, then pick another open window to fill the right (or vice versa). You can then drag the divider to set up a one-third / two-thirds split screen if you like. That's all well and good, but it's the next steps that make this whole thing feel not quite baked. If you rotate the tablet 180 degrees, everything flips. So if you had a notepad open on the left and Chrome open on the right, when you flip it, the notepad ends up on the right. I found it disconcerting, but perhaps that's just a matter of it being different instead of it being broken. Different UX strokes for different OS folks. [...] I don't want to be too harsh on the lagginess I experienced because it's unfair to judge software that's still in development. But I did experience a lot, even on the more stable builds. That's a particularly egregious problem when there's no physical keyboard. If there's one thing that will drive a user crazy, it's input lag. And I saw much too much of that, even on the Stable build, which is what most educators will experience with this tablet. I also felt at times that I was struggling to hit buttons with my finger that would have been no problem if I had a mouse.
By default, all apps in Chrome OS go to full screen in tablet mode. Recently, however, split screen was rolled out. You tap the multitasking button on the lower right, drag one window to the left, then pick another open window to fill the right (or vice versa). You can then drag the divider to set up a one-third / two-thirds split screen if you like. That's all well and good, but it's the next steps that make this whole thing feel not quite baked. If you rotate the tablet 180 degrees, everything flips. So if you had a notepad open on the left and Chrome open on the right, when you flip it, the notepad ends up on the right. I found it disconcerting, but perhaps that's just a matter of it being different instead of it being broken. Different UX strokes for different OS folks. [...] I don't want to be too harsh on the lagginess I experienced because it's unfair to judge software that's still in development. But I did experience a lot, even on the more stable builds. That's a particularly egregious problem when there's no physical keyboard. If there's one thing that will drive a user crazy, it's input lag. And I saw much too much of that, even on the Stable build, which is what most educators will experience with this tablet. I also felt at times that I was struggling to hit buttons with my finger that would have been no problem if I had a mouse.
How about sticking with ONE interface paradigm? A standard desktop windowing system.
All you need to do is make it scale, and that's not a problem anymore with the high resolution of devices.
You'll still have the unsolvable problem of having to draw a shitty on screen keyboard on top of everything for certain devices, but so what? That's unavoidable.
I don't want a dumbed down interface on websites. I don't want it on my desktop. I don't want it on laptops. I don't want it on tablets. I don't want it on phones.
And yes, I have used phones as displays for my actual desktop computers via RDP and TeamViewer. It's not ideal, but it's totally fine even without scaling.
I have a Chromebook. It gets input lag EVEN WITH A KEYBOARD. While just about any app I want to run will run on it, many times, it simply does things the Android way - Even in multitask mode, if I have Camfrog open, and Chrome open, switching from Camfrog to Chrome with a simple mouse click kills my camera in Camfrog, forcing me to unpause it when I go back.
Google's Engineers don't know their heads from their asses. When your Windows chrome Omnibar insists on doing a search on a FULL URL YOU JUST TYPED WITH THE INTENT TO GO DIRECTLY TO THAT SITE, you know Google doesn't even have the bare basics done right for a fucking web browser, let alone a full-blown OS. (No, I use F6 to go directly to the omnibar, all my newly-opened tabs are blank so no searchbar in the middle of the page to go to, and I use the enter key on the keypad to avoid accidental shift-enter searches.)
It's a good thing I didn't pay for the Chromebook. No buyer's remorse, here, since I have no sunk cost. It's just a toy I can use to show people just how shitty the Google experience is in reality.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Sorry, I don't agree. I've been working with (and programming for) Chromebooks for a number of years now and they are really quite excellent laptops as long as you understand the model in which they're designed.
They're not stand alone systems, they need an internet link. They are Google so that you need a gmail account and understand how to use GDrive resources. Where they really shine is in the classroom and they're pretty good systems for letting your kids work with.
I'm confused by your reference to Camfrog because I don't believe that there's a Chrome Extension for that app - there is one for Android and if you're using that, then you probably will have problems on a Chromebook because Android apps are still somewhat marginal.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Well, ChromeOS is the ultimate "browser OS". If you want to use most of your services in the browser, ChromeOS is perfectly suitable. And let us be honest, for a lot of services from Facebook to Reddit, the browser UI is better than the Android app.
Then there is the fact that Android never really convinced on a tablet. Google is great about telling developers to make apps adjust to the bigger screen, but even Android's own settings app utterly fails to do that. Apps for Android on tablets just suck.
And the Chromebook hardware is just really nice - easily worth the price.