We visited my in-laws out of state for the last week or so and flew back in to Atlanta (snow?!?!) late last night after a whirlwind adventure in gift giving with small children involved. The drive home from the airport was fairly easy, and when we got to our door there was a package right next to the door. I didn't even look to see what it was but just grabbed it and got the girls inside and proceeded to unload the car. Finally I went to open the almost entirely unmarked box, which had no information except my name and address (with "Individual" under my name) and the return address - no sender name. Thinking this was a present from some relative, I didn't think much of it until I got the outer box off and saw the box inside it:
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| Image from the Google Cr48 Pilot Program page. Used without permission, but I'll take it down if Google wants me to! |
It took me 2 or 3 seconds to make the connection and remember where I'd seen this -- on the Google Chrome OS Cr48 info page! My wife later commented that she thought I was going to poop my pants in my excitement! ;-) Needless to say I was up way too late last night playing with it.
It's a very basic and rather thin notebook. It's matte black, with a very minimal set of ports (1 USB, power, 1/8" headphone jack, and a VGA port) and no identifying marks on the outside at all - no logo, no model info, nothing. There are, of course, serial numbers and such under the battery, but that's it. It has a built-in webcam, a large clickable trackpad (like late model Macbooks), and a keyboard that most resembles that of a Macbook. There are some notable things missing such as an optical drive and an ethernet port. I haven't missed either of these so far, but I would like to have bluetooth so I can use my bluetooth mouse with the Cr48. I tried plugging in my bluetooth dongle, but it didn't even light up. :-(
There are a few notable differences with the keyboard. First, it has no Caps Lock key - the key itself is there, but is labeled with the image of a magnifying glass and its default function is to open a new tab with the search bar focused. Also, the function keys are not "F" keys, but are rather labeled with icons. Fortunately, there's an on-screen key command guide that you can pull up by typing control-alt-slash. The erstwhile functions keys are: esc, back, forward, reload, fullscreen, next window, bright down, bright up, mute, volume down, volume up, and power. It's otherwise pretty standard, except that the keys are labeled with lowercase letters.
As expected, the interface to Chrome OS is almost exactly like you get by run the Google Chrome browser maximized with all OS toolbars or panels hidden. There are some differences, of course, such as the Settings menu item instead of Preferences. There Settings window has tabs on the left and has most of the same options as the Preferences window in the Google Chrome browser (at least on my Ubuntu machine), with the addition of controls for basic system settings (time/date, trackpad, language, accessibility options), internet connections settings (wi-fi and 3G) and settings related to user access (allow guest access or not, whether or not to show usernames and pictures on the login screen, and the option on limit who can sign on). This last one was particularly interesting to me, because the default settings are to allow guest access and the checkbox "Restrict sign-in to the following users:" is unchecked. This is exactly the opposite of what I have come to expect from other operating systems, where guest access must be explicitly enabled (if it's even an option) and you must explicitly create a user account for each user.
More to come...
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