I’ll be honest, when watched the Google Chrome event in December, I was so thrilled Google made a laptop that I signed up a few times in hopes I would be part of the CR-48 pilot program. After the first batches went out I decided it wasn’t in the cards. Then just two nights ago, Feb 7th, UPS came to the door and took off before I got there. I couldn’t remember ordering anything that big, until I picked up the box and felt the weight of it, I knew that was the only thing it could have been.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpuangel/5426165341/sizes/m/in/photostream
After using it for a few days, activating the Verizon 3g modem and trying to function with it instead of my desktop or my 17″ laptop, I still love it. The only thing I couldn’t do at all was grab the photos I have in this post from my Canon Rebel, as it uses a compact flash card (The CR-48 has an SD card slot) and the rebel doesn’t format the card so I can use a usb card reader. So it didn’t recognize the camera at all. Oh well, this is a beta device at best, the 3g setup was painless, the track pad takes some getting used to(two fingers for right click single finger for left click.) and the keyboard take a few minutes to adjust to. They say the keyboard is full sized, but it’s a little bit smaller.
I find it a really nice size to just throw in my go bag in case I need it, and with the battery life I rarely feel I need to keep the adapter handy.
As you can see from the pictures it lets you download stuff to the 16 SSD and CTL+O opens the “file browser” so you can open images and whatnot, although this is meant as a scratch disk and not permanent storage. Surprisingly enough the drive doesn’t wipe at boot or anything that I can tell.
I would say I’ll use this quite a bit because the boot time makes doing things so much simpler, I literally open the lid and go, not open, wait for it to boot for a minute and then wait for the OS to load into memory and start all the applications. The adjustment was probably easier for me because I use Chrome on all my machines and had been testing it to see how much I could do just inside the browser vs. installing programs on my computer.
Hopefully this post helps anyone still waiting for theres to mysteriously show up on their doorstep or maybe just drive them more crazy than they already were.
Sent from my CR-48