Chromebook Thoughts

I've had a Google Chromebook for about a week for testing. The thought of having a browser only operating system makes me very excited. Most of what I do is inside of a browser so being able to have a small laptop that has a physical keyboard but could do things that an iPad couldn't do sounded very interesting to me.

Here are my thoughts:

Cons:

I'm a bad typist when it comes to the caps lock key, I use it instead of the shift key. So this Chromebook had a search button instead of the caps lock key. That small detail almost made THIS Chromebook unusable for me. But, I'm sure if I was keeping this machine I'd have it to unteach myself how to type.
I found myself trying to get to the desktop and exit the browser. I didn't have a really good reason for doing that other than I'm used to doing it on my Windows and Mac machines
Pricepoint: I'm not sure I could justify spending $400 on this laptop when I could spend a little more and have an iPad.

Pros:

Boot uptime: This thing was wicked fast booting up and coming out of sleep. It was almost as fast as an iOS device coming out of sleep mode. This would be great if you had this machine sitting in your living room watching tv and wanted to reference IMDB or send a quick email during the commercial break
It did 90% of what I needed it to do 90% of the time. That means that this could be a replacement for my laptop and I could use my Mac for any heavy lifting I need to do.
You can plug a VGA monitor into it and a USB Keyboard and Mouse which means this could be a desktop replacement but have the ability to go mobile.

Overall I think this machine is not designed for a geek such as myself. I think this machine is designed for someone like my dad who just gets on Facebook and email most of the time. A browser is all he REALLY needs.

While I would not spend my money on this laptop I would recommend this to a more casual user. Also, one of the target markets is for students, this laptop would be good for a student who was just using it for writing papers and doing research. Of course it wouldn't work for a student who was trying to learn how to program.