The Chrome Cr-48 netbook might just be a reference design—as in, most folks won’t ever be able to use it—but it is what Google thinks a Chrome laptop should be. And it has some pretty nice touches. Updated. More »
Google is aiming to put the “net” in netbook with Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system that focuses on web apps and online storage.
Due for release in mid-2011, the first batch of Chrome OS netbooks will come with Intel processors and Verizon data plans. They’ll download apps through a Google app store hosted on the web. Google detailed plans of Chrome OS in a press event Tuesday.
“We finally have a viable third choice for an operating system on the desktop,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO.
Chrome OS is Google’s vision of the future of computers: always-connected devices that ditch the traditional hard drive and instead rely on web-coded applications and “cloud” storage. It’s yet another area where Google goes head-to-head with its biggest rival, Apple, who recently introduced a flash-based MacBook Air and a Mac App Store for downloading apps.
Here’s a quick summary of what you need to know about Chrome OS.
Google has partnered with Samsung and Acer, whose Chrome OS laptops will go on sale in mid-2011. More manufacturers will follow.
Though exact specifications for future devices are unknown, Google is handing out an unbranded pilot device running Chrome OS called the Cr-48.
The Cr-48 features a 12.1-inch screen, an Intel Atom processor, a flash memory drive, Wi-Fi, a “world-mode” 3G chip that works with international cellular networks and a built-in “jailbreaking” mode so you can hack it.
Official price tags for Chrome OS netbooks have not been revealed, but Google’s Schmidt has claimed they will be priced between $300 to $400.
The 3G plan for Chrome OS netbooks is nothing like a cellphone’s. When you buy a Chrome OS netbook, Verizon will give you 100 MB of free 3G data per month for two years. There are no overage fees.
If you regularly need more than 100 MB, there are a few long-term plans starting at $10 a month for additional data.
And if you need more data only occasionally, you can buy a day pass to get unlimited 3G access for one day. The price for the day pass has not yet been disclosed.
Keep in mind that if you’re mostly using a Chrome OS netbook at home, you can just connect to your Wi-Fi network for free.
Google’s Chrome OS, announced Tuesday, comes along with a little something that makes us gadget-freaks pretty excited: the monolithic, plain-black Cr-48, an Atom netbook that will be shipped to selected developers and others as part of Google’s Chrome Pilot Program.
Just look at it. Normally Google’s wares are utilitarian but plain, if not plain ugly. THe Cr-48, though, is gorgeous, coming on more like a stealth-fighter than a low-powered laptop.
The matte-black box contains a 12-inch screen, weighs 3.8 pounds and sports a full-sized keyboard. It will give 8 hours of use on a single charge and Google says it will boot in ten seconds, or resume from sleep instantly. There’s a webcam, the trackpad looks like one of the giant pads found on Apple’s MacBooks, and the netbook ditches the hard drive for flash memory. After all, who needs a lot of storage in a cloud-based OS, especially when the machine packs a global 3G radio along with its Wi-Fi?
But best of all, Google has killed the Caps Lock key, the weapon of comment-trolls the world over. No longer will these idiots be able to SHOUT THEIR DUMB OPINIONS without holding down an extra key. And the rest of us will no longer have to retype a sentence after accidentally engaging this vestigial annoyance. The key that usually functions as Caps Lock is still there, but has been reassigned: Pressing it will bring up the netbook’s search function.
Google has also ditched the traditional row of function keys, replacing them with the media keys that most notebooks mix up with the function keys these days.
The unit itself is gorgeous. Over at our sister blog, Epicenter, you can find out about the new Chrome OS that it will run, as well as the Chrome Store, from my esteemed colleague Michael Calore. And if you want one of these hot machines? Bad luck, unless you get very, very lucky and are accepted for the pilot program.
With Chrome OS, Google Doubles Down on the Cloud [Epicenter]
Cr-48 Chrome Notebook [Google]
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To find out the best laptops of 2010, we checked in with Mark Spoonauer who, as editor-in-chief of Laptop Magazine and Laptopmag.com, oversaw 140+ notebook and netbook reviews this year. If you’re buying, buy one of these. More »
Dell’s Inspiron Duo is ready to buy. You may remember the clever flip-top netbook from its long gestation period: it can be either a tablet or a laptop or – with an optional dock- a small media center.
The trick is in the lid of this otherwise humdrum machine. The multi-touch panel is suspended within the screen-bezel and spins on its horizontal axis, facing out or in depending on need. The specs are as you’d expect: 1.5GHz Atom N550, 320GB, 10-inch multitouch display, 1.3MP webcam and a pair of USB ports.
The netbook part surely works fine: Dell has gotten pretty good at that. But the tablet part is little more than a gimmick. It’ll work with the installed Windows 7 OS, but not well, unless you have sharp, mouse-pointer-shaped fingers. So Dell has included its Stage interface, which can be used for browsing music, movies and photos. If you want a nice, finger-friendly way to surf the web or send a mail then you’re out of luck.
The biggest problem is the price. As specced, you’ll need to pay $550, plus another $100 for the JBL speaker dock (which also adds ethernet and more USB ports). This computer seems little more than a cynical cash-in, a product trying to get in on the current tablet hotness without actually making a proper tablet.
Inspiron Duo product page [Dell. Thanks, Amanda!]
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If you still insist on buying a hard-to-use, plasticky netbook in these days of cheap tablet computers, then you could do a lot worse than opting for the Jolibook. The hardware is the exact same pedestrian, commodity bag-of-chips that makes up any netbook, but the OS is actually pretty great.
The Jolibook runs the Jolicloud OS which, as you might guess from the name, is an easy-to-use cloud-based OS (built on Linux). I installed a beta version of the OS (now on v1.1) and found that it worked great on a netbook. Jolicloud comes pre-loaded with most everything you’ll need (Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, VLC and so on) and has a big-icon interface that is perfect for the small-screen. I even loaded it onto a Windows tablet I tested a while ago but the lack of touch-screen drivers (since remedied) ruined the experience.
The dedicated Jolibook, which could be on sale this month, sports a dual-core Atom N550 processor and a 250GB hard drive (for when you’re not connected to the cloud). The battery is a six-cell model, and the other specs, while still under wraps, should be exactly the same as any other netbook.
Like I said – the OS makes this one worth a look, but if you already have a netbook gathering dust (And really, what else are they good for?) then you might consider resurrecting it with the free Jolicloud OS alone.
Introducing the Jolibook [Jolicloud]
Photo: Jolicloud/Flickr
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When does a laptop cease to be a laptop? At a guess, we’d say it should drop the name when it becomes big enough to crush your femurs and it is hard to actually pick up and squeeze it into another room.
Asus clearly didn’t get the memo, and its NX90JQ-A1 is huge in every way, including the name. The screen of this “laptop” is an 18.4-inch monster, bigger than the TV we had when I was growing up, and the entire machine measures almost 22-inches across. It’s heavy, too, weighing in at 9.4-pounds.
But it’s those speakers that really push this machine from plain weird to silly. They’re made in collaboration with Bang & Olufsen, and are fed by an 11-Watt amp that is apparently powerful enough not to need a separate sub-woofer. Clearly this, along with the 1080p display and the slot-loading Blu-ray drive, make this a semi-portable media-center more than a proper notebook. The dual 640GB 7,200rpm hard-drives really prove this, offering plenty of storage for movies and music.
Inside, things are similarly outsized. A 1.6GHz Intel Core i7 quad-core processor is joined by the stock 8GB RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M graphics card (LAN parties!).
The oddest feature, though, is the trackpad, or rather, trackpads. There are two of them, one on each side, making this as annoying as a desktop to actually use.
How much does this ridiculous folly cost? $2,500, plus change. And you’d better put in some money for an extension cord, too: the NX90JQ-A1’s battery lasts for less than three hours, and is not removable.
Asus NX90JQ-A1 test [PC Mag]
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With every new Apple product there are usually some wrinkles to be ironed out, and the 11 and 13-inch MacBook Air have proven to be a little more wrinkled than most. Both models of Apple’s new slimline notebook have been suffering display issues. Now, Apple has acknowledged the problem in internal memos with instructions to help the Geniuses fix things.
The 13-inch MacBook Air suffers from “horizontal flickering” on the screen when it wakes from sleep or if you hot-plug an external display, and both the 11 and 12-inch models can experience a display that is “fading dark to light colors repeatedly after waking from sleep.”
The memos, snapped off Apple Store screens and acquired by the Boy Genius Report, say that the problems will be fixed in a future software update. Until then, if you have these troubles. save yourself a trip to the Genius Bar and fix them yourself. Apple says you should close the lid and sleep the computer for 10 seconds. This will power-cycle the screen and get things back to normal.
Apple Confirms MacBook Air bugs internally [BGR]
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We sometimes sneer at cellphones equipped with Adobe’s Flash browser plug-in: On tiny, energy-efficient mobile processors, the plug-in spikes CPU-usage, causing a big drain on battery life and often making the poor host browser so stuttery and unresponsive that it is rendered useless. But what of full-sized computers? They can handle it, right?
Maybe not. Much has been made of Apple’s decision to ship the new MacBook Airs without the Adobe plug-in, and in future all Macs will be made this way. In tests run by Wired.com’s sister site, Ars Technica, it turns out that having Flash installed can cut the notebooks’ battery life by one third. That’s right. Simply by not having a browser plug-in installed, the 11-inch MacBook Air gets two extra hours of battery life. Ars:
Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably — as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02 — with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions.
Anecdotal reports of the new Airs say that they run cooler and quieter than other Mac notebooks, unless they are using Flash. YouTube videos and Flash ads are pretty much the only things that cause the machines to heat up, and for their usually silent fans to spin up.
What to do? Well, there are lots of great Flash-blocking plug-ins for browsers, but these are rather heavy-handed. The sites you visit still think you have Flash, and serve ads and video only for them to be suppressed. If you uninstall Flash completely, though, the site will often have a fallback, serving static ads and — in many cases — plain HTML5 video. The content creators get their ad impressions, you get less blinking crap and better battery life, and the world gets the hint that maybe Flash isn’t as ubiquitous as it used to be.
The future of notebooks: Ars reviews the 11″ MacBook Air [Ars via Steven Frank]
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Google’s browser-based operating system, Chrome OS, will begin shipping with notebooks sometime in November, according to Asian suppliers who claim to be making parts for the devices.
Taiwanese publication DigiTimes cites “sources from component players” who claim Acer and Hewlett-Packard will soon offer Chrome OS notebooks, and Google will also be selling its own branded Chrome OS notebook made by manufacturer Inventec.
Google introduced Chrome OS in November, 2009. The operating system is built around a special version of the Google Chrome browser, modified to run web apps, and with its own underlying file and storage system. Google said that devices shipping with Chrome OS will rely on flash memory and internet storage rather than traditional hard drives. This setup will ensure extremely fast boot-up times of about 7 seconds, Google said.
“We want Google Chrome OS to be blazingly fast … to boot up like a TV,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management for Google, during the November 2009 press conference.
A release this month would also pit Google against Apple, which recently released new MacBook Airs touting flash memory and instant-on capability.
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Photo illustration by Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com
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