Performance and Chrome OS

With a tap of the power button the OS warms up, a graphical logo splash occupies the eye for a few seconds, the cursor comes alive, and then you're into the login screen in around 15 seconds. If you need to create a new user you just enter your Google account info (Google will allow different login forms, like OpenID, in the future), tap sign-in, snap a picture of yourself with the built-in webcam to use a profile shot, and "boom," you're into the OS. If you already have a profile stored, you need to type in a password every time you jump in, and it takes around 5 seconds to login.

While the boot is not what we'd call "instant" (although certainly very good), waking from the low-power standby mode is basically instant, certainly less than a second. Google claims you can stay in standby mode for around eight days, which seems pretty great to us. Clearly, we haven't had the time to test that just yet.

Once you're in the OS, you're in the browser, obviously. There's no minimize button up top, and the OS's best impression of an app launcher is the "new tab" button, which lists your apps, with "most visited" and "recently closed" sites below that. If you've seen Chrome, you've basically seen Chrome OS. Outside of tabs, there is a basic form of window management. If you hit Ctrl + N you get a new window, and you can toggle between your multiple windows with one of the action keys above the keyboard, sort of like virtual desktops.

There's a connections drop-down on the top right corner, which allows you to turn WiFi on and off, switch networks, or turn on your Verizon 3G. To the right of that is a simple battery life indicator, and, unfortunately, right now there's no way to control some power saving features, like the automatic screen timeout. You need an internet connection for the very first setup and login, but you can login to an existing user while the device is offline, and access anything that's cached or HTML5-stored on the device -- like some of those new Chrome Web Apps.

Our bookmarks and web apps carried over from desktop Chrome, but only after we remembered to set up sync on that copy of the browser -- it's on by default in Chrome OS, however. Even when we deleted our user on the Cr-48 and re-added it held onto everything just fine. The one exception to this symmetry was the small selection of default apps that Google has installed on the laptop, including EA's Poppit!, one of the most mundane Flash games we've ever come across. Those never get pushed to our other Chromes.

Even non-browsery things take place in the browser, like browser and system settings (the latter of which is laughably minimal, primarily concerned with setting the time zone). Google Talk is a pre-installed extension, and pops up a little dialogue from the bottom of your screen, which can be minimized into a small bar -- think of a purtified version of the separate GTalk chat "windows" in Gmail. A similar pop-up exists for downloads.

Wait, did we say downloads? Yes, we did. There is actually a filesystem, which we've seen two separate views for. When you upload a file on some random web app (like the excellent Pixlr Editor), you get a Linux-style file browser, with a full view of the file system, including the ugly OS-level stuff -- we doubt Google wants us to see this, in fact. However, if you upload a file from a blessed web app like Gmail, you get a very simplified file browser that shows any files you've downloaded and any screenshots you've taken. Ctrl + O opens that "file browser" up as the downloads pane, in case you want to rummage through screenshots you've taken or files you've downloaded without actually uploading them somewhere.

The other biggest difference between this version of Chrome and the desktop version that we noticed was that not all extensions can be installed, even ones that are listed with pretty new icons and meta data in the Chrome Web Store. Luckily our favorite was no trouble: FlashBlock.

And speaking of Flash... it seems to be this laptop's Achilles' heel. Even things as minor as Pandora seem to be putting a huge strain on the system, and cause everything else to slow down. When Google claimed Chrome OS ran the web "natively," it seems like it was ignoring the fact that Flash feels like emulation. Still, it's nice that it can run Flash. Is that hypocritical of us? The fact that Pandora or MOG can act as a music player on an OS that doesn't have a music player seems vitally important to the future of this OS.

Flash was the most painful when trying to deal with video. YouTube videos weren't perfectly smooth, but were at least passable at standard resolutions. Hulu videos, however, were unacceptably choppy. Also, the choppy, laggy, blurry video chat we attempted through Google Talk made us want to murder someone. It felt like we'd just wound back the clock and were using a hopelessly underpowered netbook, and we doubt that's how Google would like its shiny new OS to be perceived. Luckily, Adobe has already stated that it's on the case, and 10.1 (which means hardware acceleration) is in the works. In the meantime we found HTML 5 video, including clips from Youtube.com/HTML, to be an improved experience. At full screen video is still very choppy, but we're inclined to blame part of that on the N450 processor -- having a dual-core N550 CPU in here probably would have improved that experience.

One feature that we didn't get to spend too much time with but could be pretty clutch is Cloud Print. Basically, you set up your copy of Chrome on a regular computer to recognize printers on that local machine, which then get shared via your Google account with any other Chrome browser you've logged into, like your fancy Chrome OS machine, which can then print to any printers associated with that host machine. It might not sound as fancy as Apple's AirPrint, but it's probably going to be a lot more useful in the short term.

Google already went over this, but in case you missed it: multiple users is a breeze. Not only is it easy to set up a new user and sign in and out (though you have to enter your password every time it seems -- we didn't see a way to make one user a default), but the guest user spawns an "incognito" browsing mode, that not only stops the guest from accessing any of your info, but also covers the browsing tracks completely of the guest user. We figure the Googlers responsible for Chrome OS have some pretty shady friends, so we can't blame them for taking precautions.

Now, we've given our thoughts on a lot of this OS because we like you guys, but at the end of the day it's beta software running on non-commercial hardware, and that's why this is a preview, not a review -- none of this is final. Google has made it clear that it has plans to make a lot of improvements to the OS before it launches, and it certainly needs it. We encountered plenty of bugs and slowdowns, to be sure. On occasion when we went to sign out we ended up losing our session, as if it had "crashed" -- though thankfully a "restore" dialogue came to our rescue each time. Some extensions that worked for us initially stopped working later on, and some sites would perform really well one moment and really sluggishly the next. Interestingly, Google touted the OS as immune to the sort of slowdowns you get over weeks and months with a desktop OS like Windows, but we noticed slowdowns over a matter of minutes and hours. Hopefully these kinks can be ironed out, but we also wouldn't mind if third party manufacturers use some more powerful hardware than what Google's cobbled together.

Verizon connectivity and Battery life

As promised, this was pretty much a snap to set up. All Chrome OS laptops are getting 100MB a month of free data from Verizon for the first two years of their laptop, but if you want more data than that there are a variety of pay options. Ten dollars gets you unlimited data for a day, and there's a meter on the tab that reveals how much data you have left. Pretty helpful, Google.

Google promises eight hours of battery life. Our units came with a halfway charged cell, which means we'll be updating this portion of the preview when we get this thing filled up with juice and can use it out and about. Right now at least one of our units seems about on pace for Google's estimate.

Wrap-up

This is a tough one to sum up. It's not a "real" product, in the sense that you can't buy it. Still, it represents the infancy of a series of products that will be very real and probably pretty well priced. We can already see some reasons why particularly browser-bound folks might consider this over a netbook, but for most people we'd say Google has a long ways to go to create a true netbook or laptop alternative -- besides, how many secondary and tertiary devices does one person really need? While the OS is pretty much all that matters here right now, and the internals are nothing special, our favorite part of the Cr-48 probably happens to be the one true inessential element: the design. We wish more computer manufacturers would take a note out of this understated book.