Living with Chrome OS, The Good.

So, with the ugly bits of cloud computing out of the way, let's talk about what was good about the week living on ChromeOS. A week of relying on an experimental Google laptop didn't send me running for the hills. These reasons are part of why.

First, let's talk battery life. The CR-48 has VERY good battery life, at least by my reckoning. My Acer is usually dead after 3.5 to 4 hours worth of use, assuming I turn the backlight down and I don't use the optical drive at all.  Last night I used the CR-48 for 3 hours on battery alone, and wasn't even below 50% on the battery meter. We should take this last bit with a grain of salt, since power meters on laptops are sometimes little more than educated guesses about how much is left in the power pack (my eeePC is testament to that), but my experience throughout the week was pretty much similar the whole way.

I don't really attribute this entirely to the hardware either. While the CR-48 does have a reasonably-sized battery, it's not really the multi-cell behemoth you might expect for something I can use for 6 hours without it dying. A lot of the battery life I expect is because of the lightweight nature of the OS. There just isn't much that runs in the background, and the less work the machine has to do, the more battery life the device is going to have. Since a ChromeOS computer runs even less in the background than your average Android phone, I'd expect the battery life on commercial models to be good as well.

Then there's the boot time. ChromeOS is designed to go from sleeping to functional in an instant, and for the most part the designers seem to have succeeded. Negotiation to join the wireless network seems to be the only thing you wait for when the machine goes from sleeping to active. Even booting is a matter of less than a minute.

I carry my laptops all over the place, and even though I'm hardly a jet-setter (my last flight was about 4 years ago), the boot time is REALLY nice. My Acer (which runs windows) still takes minutes to go from off to a usable state (even running a boot-time manager like Soluto), and even going from sleeping to running takes a while.

Lastly it's useful, at least for me. If you are willing to commit to cloud services (and I know for some that's a BIG if), ChromeOS is going to let you get stuff done. I had access to my documents using Google Docs. I had access other files using the Dropbox website. I could contact people via instant message using imo. I could still read all my RSS feeds using Google Reader, and was even able to listen to podcasts through it. It was a very functional web experience.

This isn't faint praise. Considering that ChromeOS is an almost entirely new operating system (by my understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong), the web experience is pretty complete. Even flash-based sites like Hulu work right out of the box. By comparison my first experiences using Ubuntu (which were admittedly years ago) were far less complete.

I was forced to live on my CR-48 every day, and I was able to do so. That in and of itself is something of a victory. This is especially true since it seems fairly evident that ChromeOS was not really designed to replace a computer with a full-featured operating system, but instead to augment it.

Next up: Time to face the music. Let's take a look at The Bad.