Samsung Chromebook Series 5 Review 136
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister takes an in-depth look at the Samsung Chromebook Series 5 3G and finds the device comparatively lackluster. 'The Chromebook is lightweight and inexpensive, and it offers a full-featured Web browsing experience. But its low-end hardware, lack of versatility, and primitive support for commonplace computing tasks such as printing, file management, networking, and media playback make it a poor choice for everyday use, particularly in a business setting,' McAllister writes. 'All in all, the Samsung Series 5 is an average-quality netbook with a large screen and a higher-than-average price tag, while Chrome OS itself feels more like a proof-of-concept project whose time has not yet come.'"
Chrome OS = thin client all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when thin clients were all the rage, guys? Remember Bill Joy telling us the network is the computer? It was true!
Well, kinda...
As it turns out, internet access isn't ubiquitous, at least not yet. In the age of 4G smartphones and tablets we'd like to think it's ubiquitous, but you really only notice that it's not when you have a system like a Chrome OS laptop that literally does not function at all without a network connection.
Even if it were available all the time (airplanes, underground, in the wilderness) it's still not fast enough. And even if it were fast enough, presently we have to deal with usage caps.
Chrome OS is an idea way too far ahead of its time. Right now there's no reason to ditch native software that works perfectly well.
Re:Right tool for the job... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I can save money by buying something else and just running Chrome in full screen on Ubuntu or something, or don't get it.
I find Google's experiment conceptually interesting, and its continued evolution will be something to see; but in its present state(while I wouldn't turn a free one down) it doesn't seem to be worth any premium over whatever netbook is winning the knife-fight-in-a-telephone booth on price/performance today, just running a web browser most of the time.
The eternal problem of a WebOS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Chrome OS = thin client all over again (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the problem is that to have a slick, user-friendly UI that doesn't get in your way with latency caused by inadequate performance, you need enough performance that doing thick-client stuff is trivial, and there's no reason not to include it.
I think if you used the SSD to hold a fairly large cache of applications, you could practically work "in the cloud" a bit like distributed RCSes (eg. git) do, and re-sync everything when the laptop can connect. You can still have backgrounded automatic update of the cached apps, and you can manage the cache completely automatically (or allow more power to users to "pin" data and apps to the cache). I haven't used ChromeOS before, but if it's on its way to working like that (TFA suggests it isn't there yet), it would be workable for some use cases.
I'd also like to see some open-source web apps rise to fame, I'm sure most companies deploying these things would be happy to contract with Google, but for government work or running a small company that competes with Google, I'd prefer to recompile the OS to point at a privately-managed cloud (which would probably be as simple as a couple of clustered web servers and maybe a DR site)
Re:What apps can I run on a Chromebook? (Score:2, Insightful)