Are you ready to embrace the cloud? Gird your loins, for Google’s Cr-48 (or Chrome OS Notebook, laptop prototype or whatever else you want to call it) is itching to drag you kicking and screaming up to the cloud and into it.
Google’s Cr-48 is, as many Google projects are, a brazen experiment in laptoppery that’s so crazy it just might work. Might not, either. For the Cr-48 — or whatever it ends up being called -– is really a notebook only in the sense that it has a keyboard and a hinge which lets it fold in half.
The sell here is that the Cr-48 runs Google’s new and long-anticipated Chrome OS. Based on a skeletal Linux build, it is virtually instant-on and instant-off, and its simplicity is hard to overstate. That’s because Chrome OS really is almost nothing but the Chrome web browser.
When you turn on the Cr-48, it drops you right into the Chrome browser, with a handful of icons which are really shortcuts to web pages. Anything you can do on the web -– with Chrome on Linux, anyway -– you can do on the Cr-48. Flash, JavaScript, whatever, it’s all possible, but of course, Google would prefer you stick to Gmail, YouTube, Picasa and the like. Google’s services are tightly integrated with the Cr-48, to the point where you’re asked for your Google ID when you turn on the machine for the first time.
And be assured: None of this will work if you’re not online. The Cr-48 supports every kind of Wi-Fi, and it packs a Verizon WWAN system with a killer hook: Users get 100 MB of free bandwidth every month. That’s not much, but it can get you through the dead zone between Starbuckses. (Additional bandwidth costs up to $50 for 5 GB a month.) It won’t, however, do you any good on an airplane without Gogo: You can open a few cached web pages on the Cr-48, but mostly it’s a 3.6-pound brick when you’re offline.
Under the hood the Cr-48 has netbook guts: a 1.66-GHz Atom CPU, 2 GB of RAM and integrated graphics, all powering a 12.1-inch, 1280 x 800 screen. Battery life is impressive: at least 8 hours with the wireless on (because you’d never turn it off). You also get a sole USB port (for input peripherals mainly) and VGA output. And there’s a grainy webcam.
Sure looks like a laptop. But is it really? Consider the evidence: The 16-GB SSD drive is not user-accessible, and you can’t store any files on the machine. Want to type a letter? You’ll need to go to Google Docs (which, oddly, is not a default icon). Want to write an e-mail? You’ll have to visit Gmail. Want to view a picture or video on your camera’s SD card? Well, er, you’ll have to upload it to the web from someone else’s real computer: The Cr-48’s SD slot is nonfunctional. Remember: You are not allowed to access local files, period!
Hackers are surely going to start finding a way to mod these things to overcome their limitations –- I tricked the machine into downloading a Firefox setup file, but had no way to open it — but for now the Cr-48 is really more of a tablet masquerading as a laptop. It even has its own app store, already full of the usual suspects. Weatherbug FTW!
WIRED Caps-lock key re-imagined as a search button. Nifty instant-on capabilities. Beautiful, bright display. Epic battery life.
TIRED Useless without wireless connection; only moderately useful with one. Requires massive buy-in to the Googleverse. Printing via cloud connection to another PC is erratic at best. Touchpad — “it’s all one big button” — requires lots of retraining. Keyboard feels clammy.
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