Blog Archives
The Chromebook One Month Later: Tantalizingly Close, But Still Feels Beta
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Wait. Why Do I Have A Desktop?
This is the desktop on my Samsung Chromebook.
Two things should jump out at you.
1. It’s awesomely reminiscent of Mac OS (but slightly sexier)
and
2. Why the heck do I have a desktop on my Chromebook?
The answer to 2 is that I shouldn’t, but I have to.
As everyone who’s been reading lately knows, I am an unabashed fan of the idea of ChromeOS and Chromebooks in general. A super light, super quick OS that is essentially just a web browser with a file manager built-in? In a world where most users either do, or could if properly informed, spend all of their time in a web browser, ChromeOS is a computing philosophy that feels perfect. It’s certainly the shape of things to come.
In practice the idea mostly holds up. I’ve used my Samsung Series 5 as my primary machine for the past month and, with very few exceptions, it’s functioned exactly as I’d expected it to. Samsung’s claims of an eight-hour battery life have more than held up; I do most of my work from coffee shops and client’s offices and I haven’t had to pack my charging cable once. In fact, most days I get home and still get an hour or two of use out of the machine before I finally see the low battery warning.
Likewise, the Chromebook’s footprint is nigh perfect. I hate the cramped feel of a netbook, but I also hate the weight and bulk of most laptops. The Series 5 straddles the gap between the two quite nicely. It’s almost as compact as a netbook, but the slightly larger screen and full size keyboard make it feel far less like a toy than comparable offerings from ASUS, Acer and Dell.
Web browsing is terrific; the wi-fi radio seems to have a better range than that in any of the notebooks I’ve used in the last year, which means that, compared to my wife’s Macbook on our home wi-fi network, I get far less signal and drop issues. Occasionally I’ve run into the too-many-tabs= uber-lag issues that others have reported, but with every OS update those occurrences happen less and less frequently.
But the Chromebook does have a few failings. And, unfortunately, the areas it fails at are fairly crippling. Read the rest of this entry
Mobile Is Dooming Itself: Cool Things Shouldn’t Destroy The Continued Development Of Useful Things
I know, I know, I said I didn’t care about what CES had to offer this year. I figured that if I spent the next few days just reading web comics and Mac news, I’d be able to avoid any news coming out of that once hyper-exciting event.
Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Leander Kahney, the editor over at Cult of Mac, wrote up this little ditty about the current state of Consumer Electronics and where all the sales are coming from. In short, smartphones and tablets are eating up all of our spending dollars, to the exclusion of pretty much every other device type, other than high-end cameras (which are kind of niche comparatively, anyway).
I say this as someone who is passionately committed to seeing the mobile space and cloud computing grow; this is very bad news for all of us.
I spend the majority of my days away from my office. I work out of coffee shops, client’s offices and, occasionally, Mexican villas. I love and depend on mobile technology to make my work life possible. But I also, even though I hardly ever use them in person, depend on things like my desktop, standard sized laptops, Blu-Ray player etc. Without those tools, my mobile life would significantly less convenient. Read the rest of this entry
