You'll find many posts similar to this online, but I still wanted to throw my opinions out there about the Google Notebook (Cr-48) that I received yesterday. My great wife was kind enough to do the whole unboxing scene for me while I was at work, so now I can spare you with all the detailed pictures of each step as I take it out of the box. I'll just give you the one picture that she sent me. :-)
I signed up for the pilot program to test the notebook seconds after it was announced :-), which was about 2 months ago. A couple of weeks ago I was also able to sign up using a special link through Box.net. I'm guessing that was the link/survey that got me into the program, but who knows. If you want more info about the pilot program or to apply to be a tester head over to the
Google site here.
Overall, I like it! The feel of the notebook is great. It reminds me of a black MacBook. The keyboard looks good, and works great. I've only used the built-in webcam for a short time, but it was fine. There is a sensor next to the webcam that adjusts the screen brightness automatically that is kind of nice, but I still find myself using the physical buttons, located in the place where you'd normally find function keys at the top of the keyboard. The clickpad feels great, but has flaws (covered later). The battery life is amazing. I turned it on at 7am this morning and immediately put it to sleep, used it on the bus ride to work for about 15 min, showed it to several coworkers throughout the day, and it slept the entire rest of the day between those 'events.' I got home and have been using it for a little over 3 hours while surfing the web, watching tv shows, streaming music, blogging - and the battery is telling me that it still has 50% remaining and expects itself to last 5 more hours. Pretty impressive if you ask me.
So a bit about the actual operating system, Chrome OS. It's snappy. It wakes up from sleep in about 1 second. Really quick. That made it super easy to whip out and show to my coworkers though. It boots in several seconds as well. No wait times found there. In the end, it's very minimalistic which helps make it so quick. It's basically just Google's Chrome browser that you can install on Windows/Mac/Linux with a few extra things.
Now how about some of the flaws, eh? That clickpad... It looks great and flows with the rest of the notebook, but it's not that great when it comes to function. To left click you can just tap your finger, or you can press your finger down and the entire pad clicks... clickpad. :-) Right click is a bit more tricky unfortunately... You use two fingers and press down the clickpad. I have about a 50% success rate. It normally just thinks that I want to left click. The alternate right click has a 100% success rate, but isn't the 'cool' option - hold 'alt' and click normally. To scroll down pages you can drag two fingers on the clickpad. It works a bit better than the two-fingered right click, but it ends up jumping around the page for me. Maybe it will all get better with practice, but it's propably just finicky hardware. But we're not supposed to be testing the hardware, Google is giving these to use to test the software. :-)
Another problem I've encountered for all you techies is that it wont connect to the ad-hoc wifi network that my iPhone uses to tether. I've read that the hardware is able to connect, but the software prevents is. I hope Google enables that soon. Also disabled -The ability to use wireless networks other than Verizon which is already configured and ready to go for you. There's even a slot under the battery for a SIM card (think AT&T/T-Mobile). The built in bluetooth is also disabled. Might also be able to use the bluetooth to tether to my phone's internet once they enable it.
I also wish that you had more access to the file system. I know it's designed to be completely in the cloud, but it's still nice, and needed I think, to be able to access some of my files on an external USB drive. Or what about the files that you download? I'd like to be able to get to them at a later time easily, and once a file is downloaded, it seems that there's no way to rename it.
Something else that didn't work as well as I'd have liked and was a downer on the whole user experience was streaming those TV shows that I mentioned earlier. I used Hulu and had to turn it down to the lowest resolution of 280p and the video was still very choppy. I turned it up to 480p and it would almost skip entire scenes. The hardware just isn't quite fast enough, so hopefully real production units will be better equiped.
Anyway, those are a few of the things that I've found and played with. Granted it hasn't been more than a few hours and so maybe with more time I'll find my way around better, or learn tricks to make that dang clickpad do what I want. Thanks for following through my mess of thoughts. If you have any questions, want anything cleared up or explained better, or want me to 'report' on any other features or something you might have heard about just comment below and I'll get it into a following post.