The Latest Technology News: Google Cr-48 Chrome laptop preview (update: video, more photos!)

Thursday, 9 December 2010

Google Cr-48 Chrome laptop preview (update: video, more photos!)

Well, would you look at what showed up on our frigid doorstep this morning? That's right, we are now the proud owners of Google's first Chrome OS laptop -- the Cr-48. Obviously, we ripped open the box and got right to handling the 12.1-inch, Atom-powered laptop. So, what does the thing feel like? How's that keyboard? And more importantly, how's Chrome OS looking? Stand by for our impressions, which we'll be adding in depth over the day. First impression: this thing is different. Here are some quick bullet points, one of our favorite formats for presenting data in a list:

Hardware

The entire body is made of a soft, beautiful matte black. It feels very Droid-like, just a little less rubberized.
Overall, it looks a lot like a black MacBook, including a magnetic latch with a split spot for getting your finger in and lifting the lid, a very similar keyboard, and a similar hinge design.
There's on of those large Envy-style clickpads. It has great multitouch scroll, and great general mousing feel (better than most Windows laptops), but it also has some of that Envy trouble of disliking a finger floating on the lower part of the pad. Basically, you have to click or mouse, you can't be doing both at once.
If you don't like the ClickPad you can always attach as USB mouse. We plugged in the Logitech Anywhere MX and have been mousing away.
The matte screen overwhelms us with gratitude. Thank you, Google. Thank you.
There's ultra-wide ctrl and alt buttons on the left side, thanks to the lack of a Windows Key.

Software

It starts up instantly, and it's actually really hard to tell if we've put it into standby or not because there are no drive noises, and we haven't hit upon any fan noise yet either.
We're having trouble installing Photoshop.
~~Our apps haven't synced over from our desktop's copy of Chrome, which must be a still-forthcoming feature.~~ Update: Our bad, we didn't have sync setup correctly on our desktop copy of Chrome. We're syncing everything, including apps, just fine now.
You need an internet connection for the very first setup and login, but you can login to an existing user while the device is offline, and access anything that's cached or HTML5-stored on the device -- like some of those new Chrome Web Apps.
While wake from standby takes less than a second, a cold boot takes around 15 seconds to get to the login screen, and another 6 or 7 seconds to login after you've entered your password.
The remainder of our impressions will be about Poppit!.
Flash is really bad, both with general applications and particularly with video. Adobe hasn't built Flash acceleration yet for Linux, and there's not a hardware acceleration chip, either. Hulu is like a slideshow, YouTube works, but not great.

The most important thing to remember is that this product is in no way designed for the mass market, and it's up to Samsung, Acer, and other forthcoming third parties to actually build the hardware we'll end up buying in the long run. Still, there seems to be a lot here that laptop manufacturers of all sorts could take note of, and generic-ified or not, the Cr-48 is pretty striking

Update: There's video after the break!

Update 2: We added more shots of the beautiful, beautiful hardware. Did we mention it's beautiful?

Developing...

Gallery: Google Cr-48 Chrome laptop preview