Chromebooks

Branching out from (last week incorrect) predictions.
I got a Chromebook.  this was partly for personal amusement and partly to see what it is.

Hardware:

HP Chromebook 14 - why:

• because it has a full size keyboard.  

Tattoos and piercings were the criteria that I used to generation gap myself from the youth, now it is a wish for full size keyboards.

• cheap

These things are relative, it was £251 and came with a 2 year 'datapass' (250mb H+ via 3 per month) and 100gb google cloud storage.
In context, the 3g Nexus 7 2013 is £299, and you need to provide your own sim.
Having recently visited my local food bank (to donate), I am going to be rather more careful about saying whether something is cheap to an unknown audience in future.

• Reasonable battery life

Seems to last me 2+ days - I do not play much music / any videos

• Things that surprised me

It is as fast as my (2 year old) core i7 laptop.  No, really.  The thing is that all it is doing is rendering web pages, possibly quite complicated ones, like a big Google spreadsheet with many custom functions.  The Chromebook's apparent performance is about the same.  Of course a 'real' laptop does lots of other things too.

• Things I changed my mind about

The colour - I got a turquoise one.  At first it looked really jarring, a week later I have stopped thinking about it.

• Things I wish were better

Might bother you

The weight - is 4lbs, yes 11in Chromebooks are about 2lb, but this is a larger form factor, and macbook air 13's are 3lb,  but they cost about 4 times as much.

The screen - no it isn't an IPS screen.  The thing is that neither is it a tablet, you will be sitting down when using it and you will set the screen at the correct angle - it seems to have about a 90 degree usable range.

The screen - no it isn't full hd.  If you are going to watch lots of films, this may be a limitation, Otherwise probably not.

Bothers me
I can hear the cpu fan in a silent room, as the processor is an Intel, don't suppose I have much choice.
The speakers are average for laptop speakers, but this thing is targeted as a content consumption device more than a work device - you get 2 months of Google music - and OH asked me to put headphones on as the noise is too tinny.

• Things I thought I might do, but probably wont now

Put Ubuntu on it.

That leads me neatly on to

Software:

It takes me a while to understand Chrome OS (or however they want to spell it), and it is still an ongoing process.  I grew up with punched tape at school, and correcting it included the use of scissors and sellotape.

I have always been conscious of the plumbing involved in writing / maintaining / running operating systems and the programs that work on them.

I have now spent 2 evenings trying to get my home server to pass port 4040 through 2 routers and the internet, translated to port 443 - and failed.

It is perhaps better to state it in terms of negatives.

• Nothing but web pages
• No viruses, virus scanners, virus scanner updates
• No in-your-face (windows needs to reboot again as part of this update) updates
• No (PS/Xbox type) games
• Not much chance of losing stuff if the Chromebook breaks/gets stolen/house burns down.

No spending time trying to make something do something, because you cannot even start.

Those who remember the first generation ipods, where an ipod was nothing but a music player and itunes was nothing but a backup tool might understand.

So, I am getting into it.