Hardware
- The entire body is made of a soft, beautiful matte black. It feels very Droid-like, just a little less rubberized.
- Overall, it looks a lot like a black MacBook, including a magnetic latch with a split spot for getting your finger in and lifting the lid, a very similar keyboard, and a similar hinge design.
- There's on of those large Envy-style clickpads. It has great multitouch scroll, and great general mousing feel (better than most Windows laptops), but it also has some of that Envy trouble of disliking a finger floating on the lower part of the pad. Basically, you have to click or mouse, you can't be doing both at once.
- The matte screen overwhelms us with gratitude. Thank you, Google. Thank you.
- There's ultra-wide ctrl and alt buttons on the left side, thanks to the lack of a Windows Key.
- It starts up instantly, and it's actually really hard to tell if we've put it into standby or not because there are no drive noises, and we haven't hit upon any fan noise yet either.
- We're having trouble installing Photoshop.
- Our apps haven't synced over from our desktop's copy of Chrome, which must be a still-forthcoming feature.
- You need an internet connection for the very first setup and login, but you can login to an existing user while the device is offline, and access anything that's cached or HTML5-stored on the device -- like some of those new Chrome Web Apps.
The most important thing to remember is that this product is in no way designed for the mass market, and it's up to Samsung, Acer, and other forthcoming third parties to actually build the hardware we'll end up buying in the long run. Still, there seems to be a lot here that laptop manufacturers of all sorts could take note of, and generic-ified or not, the Cr-48 is pretty striking.
This is a tough one to sum up. It's not a "real" product, in the sense that you can't buy it. Still, it represents the infancy of a series of products that will be very real and probably pretty well priced. We can already see some reasons why particularly browser-bound folks might consider this over a netbook, but for most people we'd say Google has a long ways to go to create a true netbook or laptop alternative -- besides, how many secondary and tertiary devices does one person really need? While the OS is pretty much all that matters here right now, and the internals are nothing special, our favorite part of the Cr-48 probably happens to be the one true inessential element: the design. We wish more computer manufacturers would take a note out of this understated book.
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