When All You Want Is the Web: Google ‘Chromebooks’ Are Here

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That being said, one of the other nice inclusions is the Series 5’s island-style keyboard. It’s wonderful for typing:

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However, I’m not overly crazy about the trackpad. It’s big, which is good, but it’s one big button in and of itself. The machine uses multitouch gestures to discern between left and right clicks much like a Mac trackpad but if you’re coming from using Windows, it takes some adjustment. I understand the idea, though, as the focus of Chromebooks is on simplicity. Which brings us to…

Chromebooks in General

There’s a lot of appeal wrapped up in the simplicity that Chromebooks offer. You log into the machine for the first time using your Google account credentials and, if you use Google’s “Chrome” web browser, all your bookmarks get synchronized to your Chromebook. If you lose the Chromebook or it gets stolen, the next Chromebook you own will have all your data right there for you—all of it is stored on Google’s servers.

The computer itself runs nimbly enough for basic web surfing but opening up too many browser tabs at once can bog things down quite a bit, especially if you’re trying to do stuff like listening to music and surfing animation-intensive sites concurrently. Games from the Chrome Web Store suffer from sporadic choppiness and HD videos from sites like YouTube do okay but have a tendency to get a little sputter-y from time to time.

(VIDEO: Google’s Web-only Notebook, the Cr-48)

Since the machine boots straight into a web browser and doesn’t allow for software to be downloaded and installed, the system sidesteps a whole bunch of potential problems that “regular” computer users often have to deal with—namely, spyware/malware/viruses and backing up all their stuff to transfer to a new machine. Those two things used to be my bread and butter as a computer technician. If everyone used Chromebooks, there’d be a lot fewer technicians out there.

But therein lies the rub.

Not everyone’s ready for a computer that just surfs the web, and for those who are, a $350-$500 price tag for a computer like that may seem a bit steep. You’ll invariably hear the argument against Chromebooks being that they’re priced similarly to netbooks and low-end notebooks, so why not just buy a machine that can actually run programs, too? You’ll hear the same argument about tablets, too, but those things are still selling pretty well.

It’s a valid argument, but one that will almost certainly prove less and less effective over time. As more things move into “the cloud,” as they say, there will eventually be less and less reliance on local storage, like hard drives, and machines like Chromebooks will likely become more and more prevalent.

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That still seems like a long, long, long way off but in the near term, people who are truly looking for a no-nonsense web-surfing computer will find a lot to like about Chromebooks. But the idea of using a Chromebook as your one and only computer still seems like a stretch at the moment, so I’d recommend viewing a $500 Chromebook as a companion device to your main computer similar to how you’d think about a $500 tablet like the iPad.

If you like the idea of a Chromebook but you’re not quite ready to drop this much money on one, I’d recommend you wait. If Google’s really serious about this whole movement (which it appears to be), we should start seeing Chromebooks getting thinner, lighter, more powerful, and less expensive. In their current state, these machines would be no-brainers if their price tags started at around $200. But at $350 and up, there’s bound to be plenty of hemming and hawing. Give it time. They’ll get better and less expensive.

Second Opinions (Samsung Series 5):

GDGT | CNET | PCWorld | Engadget | Laptop | This Is My Next

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