Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Chrome Thoughts over Christmas

A couple of things that I noticed as I used the notebook over my Christmas vacation. I've gotten a lot more used to the keyboard, and (except for no home/end) I like it a lot. It feels good to type on. The trackpad is still annoying, but again, much less so. I've gotten better at scrolling with it, although I still have a lot of trouble. No scrolling through an article as you're reading it, it's either down arrow or spacebar. But on the plus side I've learned some new keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader :)

The battery life is very impressive. I'd estimate it at 7-8 hours -- I ran from Tuesday through Sunday with normal usage without having to plug it in. It's very convenient to leave lying around on a coffee table for whenever you need to use it, and with customized cloud-based storage for all your settings, having multiple users isn't an issue at all. Sarah has used it for blog reading, although I think she hates the trackpad even more than I do.

We had free WiFi on the flight home, and I took advantage of it this time (although only to send a "I'm on a plane" message :P). It seemed pretty decent. Fast downloads, although maybe higher latency. Hard to tell for web browsing. I didn't try it, but it would have been interesting to see a streaming video through Hulu or something.

Still haven't gotten the included 3G to work. My Verizon activation hiccuped halfway through and now I think I need to get on the phone with them and straighten it out... I've seen reports of similar things in the forums, but it doesn't sound too hard to get fixed.