SourceCode: Riding the ChromeBook Cloud Part 2

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

A few weeks ago we embarked on a ambitious journey to use Google's browser-OS powered Chromebook as our main computer. With the Chromebook, specifically Samsungs' Series 5 notebook, we would handle our day to day tasks of blogging, writing articles for various print and web publications, use our social media apps, surf the web, watch videos and listen to music in a purely cloud computing environment. This is how we fared.

The first part of our experience was brief since  it served to give our initial impressions. Most of our work requires us to write blog posts and articles (MS Office), blog on a number of platforms (Browser), edit video (iMovie or Windows Movie Maker) and work with photos (Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture and GraphicConverter).

Our day-to-day machines are a MacBook Air as well as our trusty Lenovo ThinkPad X61. We put these two machines aside for the duration of our experiment to focus solely on what the Chromebook could do. 

Chromebook as your Main Computer

It is easy to think of the Chromebook as a fancy netbook and while it has many features of the very early netboooks (a web based OS, small amount of storage, few ports, no optical drive) and there are no apps on it save for the Chrome browser. Build quality and materials liken the Samsung Chromebook to a midrange consumer notebook and the 8.5 hour battery life, WiFi + 3G capability as well as the decent specs make it a decent all around notebook. 

The real challenge here is to get your head around the fact there are no apps on the machine save for the browser and whatever it is you are working on is saved and resides on the web (although with Google Docs, you are able to download your documents in various formats, so that is a good thing).

The Samsung Series 5 is well built, has a good keyboard that is not unlike what you would find on an Apple MacBook, so no compromises there.

Google Docs

We've used Microsoft Office and particularly Word since we can remember and haven't been comfortable around Pages or Open Office. Well, the word processor in Google Docs surprised us. Not only was it easy to use and figure out, it approximates the most necessary aspects of an word processor.

Saving is done in real time, to the web which means you can stop what you're writing and resume right where you left off. We did find one instance where the autosave had missed around three minutes of work, not sure how that happened but it was an eye opener.

Another, more critical eye opener was when the entire Google Docs went offline for an afternoon. The pages just wouldn't load at all and we would get cryptic messages on the screen. We were working on a real article with a real deadline and it was caught in the ether. Thankfully, I had a recent version of the article saved elsewhere which I worked on  instead. This incident, and a few others that followed, did littel to reassure me that cloud computing was ready for primetime.

At the same time, considering that Google makes this service available for free and that it works most of the time is something to consider. Here's the thing, we bought the Chromebook and with it, the promise that the web applications we would be using would be reliable.

As for Google Docs, it works surprisingly well as a word processor and while we'd like some basic features like the ability to insert the date and time, a proper word-by-word spellcheck feature and maybe a way to autosave files locally (we hear that is coming), it really does feel quite accomplished.

Photo Editing

Being a cloud OS, should you use any of the web-based photo editing applicaitions like Piknic or the simple but awesome IAZA is that you need to upload photos from your hard drive to the web to edit them and then download them again before uploading them again to WordPress or SquareSpace or any website you may be usinng.

This is tedious and time consuming but it works quite well. IAZA impressed us greatly because it is simple and fast and the range of image manipulation tools is quite expansive. The thing with photo editing in the cloud is you're stuck with working on one image at a time which can be cripplingly slow. We also do a lot of batch conversion whcih doesn't seem to be possible on a cloud OS right now.

Multimedia

Netflix and similar browser based video services work well and Chrome OS has a built in video player that will play back MP4 video (seems to do poorly with .AVI). For music, we used RDIO which worked well. Many radio stations stream their broadcasts online so the browser works well for that as well. For podcasts, we either accessed these directly on the web or used the Podcast Player Pro Chrome app.

Gogole ships a mini-VGA adaptor with the Chromebook so we were able to easily mirror our screen on a larger 23-inch monitor. Nice touch.

Conclusion

Like with many new Google products, the Chromebook and its corresponding functionality feel very beta. Much of it works well enough and is acceptable for content consumption but for someone who makes their livelihood on a computer, we don't see the Chromebook as a viable replacement for old school application based non-cloud connected computers, at least not yet.

This isn't to say that the potential for this isn't increasing. We put more importance in a Google Chromebook than we do any of the current Android tablets. You can get work done with the Chromebook and the compromises are far fewer provided your expectations aren't sky high.

What we like about the Chromebook is that it doesn't feel like a work machine, we don't get a million and one notifications for updates  (Chrome auto updates and the process is simple). We like the startup time (4 seconds) the fact that everything seems to fly (just a browser and all the 2GB or RAM is appropriated within browser apps as tabs) and that should anything untoward happen to the Chromebook, all our stuff is on Google's servers.

What freaks us out a bit? All our stuff is on Google's servers.

Not only does Google know what I surf for, where I am and everything in my email, it now has the first two chapters of that novel I am working on as well as the secret sauce recipe that's been in the family for decades. In the end, we will keep the Chromebook, we've grown to like it and hope that Google continues to refine the experience. It still gets reduced to a shiny brick once WiFi or 3G access is gone but I think they are finding a way to solve that.