Chromezone and the Chromebook
As you may have heard, Google is trying their hand at a store for the first time and they are running this little experiment in good ol’ London.
So last week I decided to pop-in and check it out.
“Chromezone” is really just a small area inside a larger tech store and all they’re showing are a bunch of Chromebooks. I would’ve really put some Nexus S’s there as well and perhaps even a few Android tablets, but that’s just me. It’s a cute concept as it is and it’s obviously based off the Apple store success, but I think it needs a bit more work to really get you the experience that Apple now provides (e.g. I don’t know about other stores, but in the Apple Store on Regent’s street they have iPads sitting next to every laptop with all the information you want about the laptops there… it’s awesome!). All in all, a good start. I hope it does well and that they will consider opening more and larger “zones”.
So I sat down and played with one of the Chromebooks. I have been really excited about the Chromebook ever since the first rumours came to be (and even before, given that me and some of my college friends were speculating that such a product will come around since 2006), so sitting down to mess with it a bit was great!
It’s a nice compact netbook with a touchpad that is very similar to the one on Macbooks. I really liked the keyboard and that says a lot, since I usually hate it on netbooks because of my gigantic hands. It does do scrolling and right-clicks like a Macbook (though not inverted as it is on Lion), but I wasn’t able to get any other multi-touch gesture to work. The OS is pretty much just Chrome so there’s really not much to comment on there… if you’ve used Chrome, this is really the same thing, plus a few extra settings.
It does have some external ports, but I wasn’t exactly able to start plugging things in so I’m not sure how all of that fits together. I obviously haven’t tested start-up times either, but I’m sure it is just a matter of seconds as advertised. I should’ve done a download to see how files get stored, but I didn’t think about it at that time so I haven’t done that.
My conclusion? Well it’s very early to say after just a few minutes of toying around. I like it, I really do and I would probably like to grab one at some point. I still think it’s a very interesting and cool concept and it has a lot of potential. The only downside I see is with the price tag (which is, I believe, very different from what was originally being thrown around). The Wi-Fi version can be yours for £349 and the 3G one for £399. I may be terribly off with this, but I think that’s a lot for what you’re getting. You can have all the same functionality (and more) from a cheaper traditional netbook. For £399 I can get an iPad. I really can’t see it be worth that money, unless I missed some awesome hidden feature.
So I don’t know… if it was half that price, I’d probably consider getting one right now. But to me it just seems expensive. Nonetheless, if you live in London, visit the Chromezone, check it out, let me know what you think.
PS: There are very quick photos snapped with my phone, so sorry about the quality. I hadn’t thought about bringing the camera along.
Google 2-step verification
If you’re like me and you’ve been running your life from your email account for several years now, you should also be pretty worried of what the consequences of it being compromised can be.
Are domains becoming obsolete?
This post will be a bit of speculative philosophical techy meditation, but bear with me please.
There are all sorts of problems with getting a domain nowadays. If someone is not cyber-squatting it, it might just be taken already (for a legit reason) and even if it all works well, it still costs you money. But we’re hanging on to our domains as the one and only solution for remembering websites. Why? Well, because it’s easy to remember www.alexflorescu.com, not that easy to remember 69.89.27.228, although both addresses will take you back here.
Nonetheless, we’ve seen a steady raise in the power and usage of search engines. While the first time I ever connected to the Internet I had a BOOK with websites and then went through years of carefully mastering the art of search engines to ever get anywhere, now I rarely even use bookmarks anymore. I know what the website I’m looking for *is* and I just use Google to get to it. It’s simply more convenient and faster.
I’ve seen a lot of people that don’t even use the address bar anymore. They type everything in the Google search bar that arrives by default on the Firefox homepage. Some of these users do not even acknowledge the existence or role of the address bar; they don’t know what it is, they’ve never used it, if it were removed they would not even notice it.
So then what is the remaining purpose of domains? Why bother when people won’t even remember the domain at all? Oh yes, they will most probably remember the title if anything, but they can use that to get to your website any day by just googling it and it’s the title they remember, not the domain. If these two happen to be different, the title will stick, the domain won’t (I’ve had this happen to me once).
Taking into account the complication and the security issues inherent to domains, I think dropping the whole idea altogether is something that should at least be considered. Of course, then we are faced with the problem of putting all the power to navigate the Internet in the power of a few (if not only ONE) huge corporations. But don’t be naive, we’ve already done that. Now let’s just make the best of it.
Google Chrome OS – FINALLY!
I first started discussing the possibility of Google launching an operating system back in 2006 with other students. Later I came to believe that the OS was already out there in the form of Google Apps, so there was little need for anything more. As it seems, Google has finally decided to give us a legit operating system to help bridge the gap between your computer and their “cloud” OS that’s already out there.
Keypoints here (from their blog):
- open-source
- “fast and lightweight”
- “start up and get you on the web in a few seconds”
- minimal user interface
- most of the user experience will take place on the web
- “completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work” (This sounds a bit exaggerated… also, didn’t Apple get a copyright on that expression yet?)
- initially targeted at netbooks (first netbooks running it will be available in the second half of 2010)
- separate from Android
Clearly, we can see the progression here. Google Search -> Google Apps -> Google Chrome -> Google Chrome OS. All they can add after this is make their own hardware and they own the system 
It also seems to me at this point that Google seems to intend to keep their cloud formula, in that your computer is just a terminal to connect to the web, where all your work really happens. As the name suggests, I am inclined to see this as just a way in which Google Chrome can run on a computer without the need of an additional OS and through Chrome you get optimized access to all the Google Apps.
Thumbs up:
- well, it’s Google, isn’t everything they make suppose to be AWESOME?
- it will be good to have a minimal OS that just starts you up on the web in a few seconds, it will definitely make netbooks more attractive to me
- when someone in IT does something new, others react right away (look at the cellphone market after the iPhone and you’ll see what I mean); I sure hope people will react to this and the concept will push innovation forward a bit, since we’ve been stuck on the current OS and application model for quite a few years now
Thumbs down:
- I am not at all happy with Google Chrome (crashes and more often than not decides to just not start up; I simply have not been able to use it consistently enough to decide whether it’s a good browser or not) and I sure hope that the OS will be better, otherwise this will not go well
- as a developer, if this does go well and they go mainstream, this means I have yet another OS to worry about; that doesn’t make me happy
We’ll see how it goes, but I think it’s overall great news! Will be watching this closely.
PS: It’s no coincidence to me that this happens just one day after Google decides to take their apps out of BETA.
