Chrome OS review

Google Chrome OS Review

Posted by Sam Churchill on December 10th, 2010

PC Magazine has a Google Chrome OS Hands On.

You can install the Chrome browser on your current laptop, and get nearly the same experience, says PC Mag. With Google’s OS everything lives in the cloud.

According to PC Mag, startups take a mere 14 seconds from power off to login. Wake from sleep took less than two seconds. For comaparison, a new 11-inch MacBook Air, which also uses faster solid-state storage instead of a hard drive, takes over half a minute to cold start, and Windows 7 PCs can often take a minute to start.

Chrome OS has no overt file system and hard drive, so you can’t browse folders and files on the local hard drive or storage, but that doesn’t mean you can’t download files from a Web site. When you do, these go into a Download area, which pops up as a small window at the bottom right side of the screen.

The Chrome Web Store not only offers Web applications, but also Chrome customizations like themes and extensions. Any app that you install on the Chrome OS machine will also appear on the New Tab page of any Chrome browser on which you sign into and turn on syncing.

According to PC Magazine;

Google has promise offline functionality for apps, but at this point, even its own Docs office suite was inoperable when I wasn’t connected to the Internet. And it’s not just apps—I couldn’t even log into my user account on the machine if I wasn’t connected. So offline functionality clearly needs a lot of work still.

Google’s Chrome OS may be particularly useful for tablets, in that the browser is fast, runs on many different platforms, and can utilize the strengths of Google’s ad network.

Chrome OS comes with Adobe Flash baked in, says Liliputing.
But while Adobe Flash Player 10.1 provides a decent viewing experience on most Windows and OS X notebooks, users are reporting that they can’t reliably view YouTube videos with resolutions higher than 480p, and the consensus seems to be that Hulu video is watchable, but just barely.

By contrast, the Archos 101 features a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel capacitive touchscreen display, a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU with support for HD video playback, and runs Google Android 2.2. Prices are expected to start at $299.99 for a model with 8GB of storage.

Laptop Magazine connected the Archos 101 to a large TV not just with an HDMI cable, but with the 101′s full-size USB port to use the HP Wireless HDMI accessory.

Even with a 46-inch Samsung HDTV. Videos, such as The Magic of Flight and Big Buck Bunny, played smoothly at full-screen, and games such as Angry Birds and Raging Thunder 2 scaled well. We didn’t notice any pixilation.

The Archos tablet, without phone support, uses the Archos AppsLib, with about 18,000 apps (and growing), about a fifth the size of Google’s Android Market.

The Viewsonic G Tablet features an NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, 1.3MP video conferencing camera, large 10.1” display, Android 2.2 OS but sports a $529 price tag ($390 at Amazon). Because Google hasn’t certified the G Tablet as eligible for its apps, the slate doesn’t come with the official Android Market. However, it does have a shortcut that links to the Handango web site, where you can download several good apps.

Laptop Magazine reviews a variety of Tablets and likes Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab the best.

source: dailywireless.org