So, for the last couple of months I have been beta-testing the new google laptop (Officially, Google CR-48 Chrome). Engadget has a pretty good set of pictures and overview here.
My 17 year old tech-savvy daughter's assessment? - "It's just the internet." Well, that's kind of the point.
I have been a Macbook Pro user for the last several years, and on the development side I favor unix-like OSs, so I have a bias. I love what the google laptop represents and it's potential - an easy to use thin end-user device where everything you do and work on is saved automatically for you in Google's cloud. This laptop is all-google-all-the-time: Chrome brower, gmail, google docs, google calendar, etc... If you are a power google user you will love the model.
The hardware itself leaves some to be desired. I recognized that this is beta-model and not a final production laptop, but there are some things that make it wonky to use. The speed and response is good enough for surfing the web and using all the various google products. Video playback is OK, but at times choppy (underpowered graphics processor). The keyboard is OK - not great. The mouse pad is weird - there is some bug where suddenly it will select a bunch of text and delete or be too sensitive and jump the cursor around. The built in Verizon 3G access is pretty nice.
Chrome OS itself is pretty solid. It looks like the Chrome browser, with a simple settings tab. The OS is very thin. There is not much to mess-up, and given the complexity of modern desktop OSs with gajillion settings and what not, it is pretty cool.
Like I said, the power of this machine is in the potential and what it says about modern computing - simple end user devices, cloud-based infrastructure storing your pictures, settings, documents and such, and the "post-pc" world. If Google sets the price point of these right, say $300-400, they could sell a bunch.
In the meantime, I will keep using it and downloading the patches to the OS. Let's see how it continues to evolve.
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