Are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced?

[kinzel]

So gang, tell me --

1) anyone have experience with a Chromebook? Thumbs up, down, sidewways?

2) anyone have experience with wrist-carried heart rate monitors? Am particularly interested in those using a chest-strap.

3) anyone have experience with Android tablets?

TIA!

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I do like my little Cr-48, which is the beta -- I understand that the hardware is somewhat different for the actual Chromebook, though the software continues to be updated.

They redid some of the keys, so there's a search key instead of a caps lock key. Since I actually use the caps lock key, I kept hitting it when I wanted caps and kept getting search tabs, so I eventually went in and changed it to caps lock.

They do allow a certain amount of window resizing now, which is important to some of my tasks.

The battery life is very nice; it was advertised to be 8 hours, and I got 8 hours out of her; I would hope that this would not change in the actual release model.

Some websites do not perform well with the limited hardware. My ~2008 desktop is more powerful than the Cr-48; in particular, all Gawker Media sites tend to make the page die, some other sites will whitescreen if the machine has too many tabs open, and videos will blackscreen while the audio carries on. I can't recommend it as one's only computer, but with the ability to send links to another machine, it's reasonably okay for most web-surfing.

It's not great for chat; I use IRC a lot and Freenode both blocks certain webchat applications from connecting, and has an execrable webchat interface of its own; the unofficial suggestion from one of the ChromeOS engineers in one of the above IRC channels involved connecting to a server with an IRC client installed on it, which is okay for people who have access to servers but not the best suggestion for the general public.

There's also no online equivalent of Scrivener that I have found. Google Docs is reasonably powerful but just doesn't compare.

I like it, and it's become my going-out-in-public machine, but it won't ever replace a desktop for me.