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.

So evidently our flight had free wireless?! On the way home I'll have the chromebook out of my bag and ready to give it a try. Not a lot more news, this thing is exceptionally convenient for browsing and email. Light and easy to pull out, quick startup and into the action, crazy battery life (I'm in hour 3 since charging, and we're at 70%. It's got an estimate, but it isn't updating right currently. I'll try to do another post about it tomorrow). It's definitely a nice go-to machine, but there's no way it'll fully replace my other laptop -- besides the gaming, there's just not enough power. I've seen a little bit of slowdown when trying to do a bunch of things at once (8+ tabs all opening and loading at the same time). But tab-handling is a complaint I have about Chrome in general -- the same thing happens to me on a real computer, although it might be at 20+ tabs instead. I wonder what sort of processor is in here, I should look at the specs sometime.

Short post tonight because I've haven't had a lot of time to play with it today. Important website support test:

• Netflix: Not supported. It's in as an issue though, and Google says they're working on it. I wasn't expecting this to work since I think Netflix uses Silverlight for playback.
• Hulu: Works. It looked a little choppy, but I don't know if that was network or cpu, I'll have to do some more testing to be sure.
• Minecraft: No dice. It looks like there's no Java support at all (got a missing plugin error).

So it's Christmastime, and we've been getting a fair number of packages at the house. Usually I know (or suspect) what's in them -- even if I didn't order them, my family does most of our gift shopping via Amazon Wishlists, so I have a good idea of what's coming in. But I got a box in the mail that I wasn't expecting at all (no Amazon packaging), so I opened it up. And found this:

This box looked amazing! And still, I had no idea what it could be. No details or labels on the outside of the box, except one that said it had a Lithium Ion battery inside. Nothing that I had ordered or added to my wishlist used batteries... but I couldn't open it until we did out gift-giving. We're going to be out of town for Christmas, so we opened the gifts that had come to the house tonight -- and it wasn't anything I could have anticipated.

It's a Cr48! A week or two ago I ran across a link to the Chrome Notebook pilot program. I can't even remember where I saw it but I said "why not?" and applied. I never thought that I would actually get in! Plus, they never sent me any notice that I'd been accepted, or an email that they'd shipped me something, or any kind of warning whatsoever. So I'm writing this on a tiny little Chrome OS-powered notebook.

First thoughts: very little documentation. This isn't a bad thing really, but I was hoping for a letter that said "Yes, you've been accepted to the pilot program. No, this isn't a cruel mistake." The documentation that was included is great though: simple, to the point, and humourous.

1. Grab the included battery, insert it, and plug in to start the flow of electrons.
2. Press the power button. Delicately.

Second thought: This thing is light. I'm terrible at estimating, but I want to say on the order of 3 pounds (w/battery). Maybe I'll weigh it tomorrow at work.

So far I've used it for: Pandora, Gmail, paying bills, Google Reader, and writing this blog post. All of the web stuff is done through the Chrome browser, so if you're used to that you know 90% of how things work. I poked around in the Chrome Web Store a little, but I haven't tried any "apps" that weren't just links to the corresponding website (like gmail and pandora are). Everything works great, except there were a couple of rendering issues with Pandora when it was starting up. It seems like an excellent interface for dealing with the web.

The Chrome sync stuff they added a bit ago works great here -- all my bookmarks, settings and extensions were automatically populated. And they're pushing it to the next logical step, basically the entire OS runs out of your Google account. In theory if your notebook is destroyed, you can just log into a new one with your account and pick up where you left off. If I knew anyone else with one I'd be interested to see that in action. It also makes me wonder if/how it works offline. But included with the notebook is a Verizon 3G 100MB/month plan. I'd assume this is just part of the Pilot, but they have options built in to purchase additional data or different plans, so something like it will be part of the final product.

What I don't like:

• The trackpad. Historically I've hated trackpads, and this one is only slightly better. There must be something about the way I type where I'm constantly hitting the pad with my palms -- I'll be typing along (like this post), and suddenly the cursor will be a half dozen lines up, typing into the middle of a word. Clicking with the trackpad is very natural, and they have right click support that isn't intuitive but would be simple to re-train my brain for. The scrolling is a little wonky -- it's two-finger scroll, which I had trouble with on the few mac's I've used, and it seems like there needs to be a decent sized gap between your fingers for it to register. Maybe it's time for me to move into the future though (I loved my old Thinkpad nubbin (inappropriate link)). It's a little awkward, but the best way I've found to scroll is to put my lef index finger on the pad, and then drag up and down with my right index finger.
• The keyboard is okay, but just different enough to confuse my fingers. I think it's the extra spacing between the keys or something, but my right hand regularly lands offset horizontally by one (; instead of ', , instead of ., that kind of thing). I also find myself missing home/end and delete a fair bit. The caps lock key has been replaced by a open-new-tab-and-google-search button, which is pretty awesome. No one likes caps lock anyway. The function keys have all been replaced by special purpose keys, most web-related (back, forward, reload, full screen, next window), and the normal laptop keys you'd expect (brightness, volume).
  

Even after griping a bit about the keyboard, I was easily able to write this entire post. The track pad is probably better than most laptop's, but I just really dislike them in general. The keyboard is responsive and comfortable to use, and I think I'll be fine with it after I learn the new spacing.

I'm taking it with me on vacation and I'll use it as my primary computer (except for gaming :P) and try to keep a "regular" blogging schedule about it.

Oh yeah, hardware. It's... a computer. Integrated webcam, VGA, USB, and headphone ports. Looks like a SD-type card slot. The link up at the top about the model probably has more information :P.