New Chromebook!
I have a brand new Chromebook! I've been playing with it for a few days and it's really cool. magnifelyn gave me my birthday present early because she wanted to make sure I got to enjoy it before it became available on the open market. She grabbed it from that early sale at Gilt, and it was sold out really quickly. I've been showing it off at work, and already a few of my coworkers have expressed interest in getting one when they become available on the 15th.
This is actually the first laptop I've ever owned that wasn't acquired through my job. Lately, I've been running a virtual machine (using VirtualBox) with Linux Mint, and to tell the truth, pretty much the only thing I've done in my virtual machine was to start up Google Chrome and use the web. So now with my Chromebook, when I turn it on, I'm on the web! It's brilliant! And by the way, the boot up time is less than 10 seconds.
ChromeOS is still kind of new, and has some issues that will eventually have to be resolved, but for the most part, if you use webmail, Google Docs or Zoho for your documents, then ChromeOS is perfectly positioned for that. This is perfect for me, since most of my non-web related work is done on one of my servers or my webhost. And thankfully, ChromeOS does have a limited shell available, which includes an ssh subsystem, so I can connect to my servers anywhere!
There are a few downsides to ChromeOS some of which will affect regular non-techie users, but I hope that as the platform matures, much of these issues will be resolved. Personally, I hope ChromeOS inspires a lot of new apps that are more than just bookmarks to websites, and are actually HTML5 apps that take advantage of the Chrome APIs and local storage for offline use. Only time will tell!
This is actually the first laptop I've ever owned that wasn't acquired through my job. Lately, I've been running a virtual machine (using VirtualBox) with Linux Mint, and to tell the truth, pretty much the only thing I've done in my virtual machine was to start up Google Chrome and use the web. So now with my Chromebook, when I turn it on, I'm on the web! It's brilliant! And by the way, the boot up time is less than 10 seconds.
ChromeOS is still kind of new, and has some issues that will eventually have to be resolved, but for the most part, if you use webmail, Google Docs or Zoho for your documents, then ChromeOS is perfectly positioned for that. This is perfect for me, since most of my non-web related work is done on one of my servers or my webhost. And thankfully, ChromeOS does have a limited shell available, which includes an ssh subsystem, so I can connect to my servers anywhere!
There are a few downsides to ChromeOS some of which will affect regular non-techie users, but I hope that as the platform matures, much of these issues will be resolved. Personally, I hope ChromeOS inspires a lot of new apps that are more than just bookmarks to websites, and are actually HTML5 apps that take advantage of the Chrome APIs and local storage for offline use. Only time will tell!