My host and another guest had planned on heading over to Staples and Best Buy Thursday night to check up on the sales, especially Chromebooks after dinner and dessert. My host is kind of queer for Chromebooks and they wanted to check out the deals. I was curious, and tagged along.
Staples first. A short line, we were a hair early. Among the first to get in, though, my friend asked about the Chromebook which was advertised. ”Sold out”, the man said. ”How can that be, we were here first?”
Staples – “We only had two, and they were sold before the doors opened.” Hmmmm!
Over to Best Buy, which had a lot (over 30 that I saw, for DanS who is confused by “a lot”) of the same Chromebooks. However, their price was about $40 more than Staples advertised. I wandered around the store, did not see any particular deals. One probably needed a copy of the printed ads.
Neither store had any particularly crush of people, or even any sort of a crowd. I would say they were “busy”, but no more so than I’d expect on a Saturday afternoon. Kind of disappointing.
Now, my friend took the opportunity to introduce me to Chromebooks. That is, as you know, a small computer which operates in “The Cloud”, a minimal computer with a small flash hard drive on board but keeps the programs and data in a Google controlled memory someplace else, the cloud.
My friend buys and sells Chromebooks, has owned a number of each model, and showed me how one works. He chose an older one, made by Samsung which sold for around $500 new. It has a 12″ screen measured diagonally, and the keyboard extends almost to the margins of a 11 1/2″ wide case.
It works well, very well. It is fast to boot, moves from task to task without hesitation, and has an incredible amount of versatility immediately. My friend punched several buttons and cleared him and all his data out of the thing, and I logged in with a Google account and was immediately the user with a wide variety of applications immediately, including youtube, gmail, a word processing program, google maps, and too many to list. It even seems to have a Skype conversion program, though I’ll have to investigate that further.
It will also drive another screen concurrently with the screen on the Chromebook, apparently allowing one to run two different programs and screens at the same time. It will not play a DVD. I don’t know if it would through an auxiliary drive. Apparently it has 4 MB RAM and a small on-board HD and will operate with minimal abilities if not connected to the web. But only when it has access to the ‘net, and thence “The Cloud”, does it come into it’s own.
I’ve run it through some of it’s paces, trying streaming video, a word processing document and email and it works as advertised. It seems to be a sturdy little thing, claims a 4+ hour battery life while being used, and seems perfect for the van. If one doesn’t like the keyboard one can plug in whatever keyboard they like, and also add an external monitor. One would need access to the Chromebook itself only to turn it on, could have it tucked away, out of the way. And then to take it into an access point one only has to unplug the monitor and keyboard. It will have access to all the same data wherever it goes. It fact, any Chromebook will access all my data if I log in with my name and password.
I’m sold. In fact I bought the unit from my friend for $250, based on his claim that it’s a better unit than the ones being sold new for about the same price or less. He says they started out selling these at fairly high prices, had problems getting people to buy into the cloud and have cheapened the units while driving down the price. However, once one stores and operates through the cloud, there’s not a lot of difference between the computers that matters. I’ll try it in the van next
AND IT’S NOT MICROSOFT, whose Windows 8 has made me a mortal enemy. None of it is Microsoft.