Samsung plans to start selling chromebooks in India in 2012. I got my hands on a Cr-48 Google test machine almost a year later than it became available in the US. I’ve used Acer and Samsung netbooks running windows 7 before and was expecting a similar experience. I couldn't be more wrong. At 1.63Kg the 12.1” the chromebook felt light. It comes with a rubberised black coating, which incidentally is a fingerprint magnet. This is a test machine and won’t be available in the open market therefore you won’t find this finish on Samsung chromebooks.
The chromebook itself is pretty barebones with one USB 2.0 port, one SD card reader, earphone jack, an on screen camera and a vga output. Networking options include wi-fi & 3G. The sim card slot is below the battery. The screen offers a resolution of 1280X800. All pretty standard stuff.
The most visible change is the keyboard. Google has done away with the function keys and has instead replaced them with keys for volume, brightness etc. Also there is no caps lock & delete keys, which I miss a lot, instead the caps lock is replaced by a search button. The second big visible difference is the mouse or touch pad. The standard touchpad has been replaced by one large Apple like touchpad with no buttons to click and takes some getting used to. There is no button to right click. instead you need to touch with 2 fingers for right click. Also to click you need to press the touchpad to click, a simple tap won’t work. However you can change this behavior in settings.
The right hand corner has 2 icons for wi-fi & battery. Connecting to my local wi-fi (BSNL) network was a breeze. It is essentially a NETBOOK so don’t expect it to have any serious offline capability. The OS is a chrome browser. It does includes a file manager but do not expect windows file explorer functionality. The open default chrome tab offers access to gmail, docs, file manager, calender, talk & scratchpad which is a notes application. If you’re thinking of using iTunes, MS Office, Win rar zipped files etc go get a windows 7 netbook. I started tasks on my Cr-48 but frequently found myself switching to my laptop to complete the same.
Performance was top notch. A cold boot of less than 15 secs and a shutdown of less than 3 seconds was impressive. Resuming from standby is a snap and almost feels instantaneous. I tried watching Singham on youtube’s boxoffice channel and video content played fine, even in full screen mode. I have read some review that say flash performance was choppy but I didn’t see it. Battery life was indeed a fantastic 8 hours. The specs say 8 days of standby, I however was unable to test this.
Chrome is essentially work-in-progress. I had higher hopes of it. Maybe I was comparing it to android which does a fantastic job (I own a Google Nexus One) or maybe to the alternative Windows 7. It does the internet stuff well enough but anything else and it falters. Even for internet stuff I found it almost impossible working with images and videos (so not images or videos for this blog, since I do it from my Cr-48).
While Samsung would offer better harware that this Cr-48, one year old model it’s still the Chrome OS that falls short. If you’re planning to wait till 2012 to get your hands on a chromebook, wait some more till the platform matures or go but yourself a windows 7 netbook. For almost the same price these netbooks offer a lot more value than chromebooks.
Score: 2/5
