I’m not saying these are bad gestures. But they’re like keyboard shortcuts on the Mac. For any command you expect normal people to actually find and use, there needs to be a visual way to find it. You can add a keyboard shortcut for expert users to memorize, but you can’t have only a keyboard shortcut. Same with these gestures.

Again the gestures aren’t ‘bad’, they’re intuitive but uncomfortable and slightly difficult to pull off.

Hardware

It’s important to point out that the hardware was never meant for public release and the software has a little-ways to go before it will be ready. But Google decided to send out an unspecified number of test units to developers and early adopters who signed up so they could receive feedback on the device and particularly the OS.

The contents of the box aren’t anything to scream about. The box contains a “Getting Started” page, an ‘Intel Inside’ card, the battery, a charger, and the Cr48 itself.

The first thing I noticed was the casing of the Cr48. The shell is nice. It has contours which are rounded on the edges, which makes typing on the thing slightly less irritating then it does on a unibody Macbook. I say that because some of the unibody Macbook Pros I’ve used have an edge that tends to be sharp. You can feel the pinch on the wrist/arms when you’re typing. The Cr48 is small and light-weight, not as portable or light as the Macbook Airs. The Cr48 though is noticeably smaller than many laptops. Honestly, while the design leaves a lot to be desired, obviously due to nature of it being a test laptop, the Cr48 ‘feels’ nice for a netbook/notebook or whatever type of book it’s supposed to be.

The Cr48 doesn’t have a lot of input/outputs: a SD Card slot, a VGA Out (which doesn’t seem to work), and a USB Port. Just above the screen is a typical webcam which is found on most laptops now-a-days.

Keyboard/Trackpad

The keyboard feels great. It’s got rubber-keys and makes typing a breeze. Google also went ahead and changed around some of the functionality of a regular keyboard. There’s no Windows/Mac type of keys so the ‘CTRL’ and ‘ALT’ keys are pretty large. There’s no ‘CAPS LOCK’ key, instead there’s now a ‘SEARCH’ key which opens up a new tab and puts focus on the ‘omni box’. There are a bunch of self-explanatory function keys up at the very top. Keys that do browser specific functions such as refresh, go forward, go backwards. There is also the typical volume mute, volume up/down keys. There is one specific key which is interesting that is the ‘Go to next window’ key. Chrome OS has an OSX ‘Spaces’ type of virtual desktop option. Whenever you open a new Chrome window or incognito window it moves the window into a new virtual desktop. To toggle between the new windows you use the ‘Go to next window’ button. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here that makes me feel like they are making uncomfortable changes. So for me it works fine. Although, I’m not a big ‘CAPS LOCK’ guy so getting rid of that key doesn’t leave me craving it.

The biggest issue, sans performance, I have is with the trackpad. I’m not sure if it’s the trackpad itself or the software for it but in general the trackpad is abysmal, awful, and atrocious. There’s no actual mouse button, it mimics the latest Apple Macbooks where there entire trackpad is a button. However, it is nowhere near as crisp or workable as the Macbook trackpads. To right-click you push down with two fingers. This gesture doesn’t pick up a third of the time. Scrolling is with two fingers sliding across the pad, which is also inconsistent. As I mentioned the hardware is really just for test, but the trackpad is such an important part of the experience that it’s downright miserable to use. Honestly, it is infuriating, not at times, but infuriating all the time.

Performance

The boot-up process is pretty quick, about 15-seconds. Coming out of sleep-mode is even faster: 1-3 seconds. Initial setup of the device is pretty simple. On the initial boot-up you are asked to select your wireless network. Once that is done it asks you to log in using your Google account, which is rather painless. Then it asks you to use a webcam to take a picture of yourself. This picture will become your profile picture. Once you are officially logged in you get what amounts to a full-screen Google Chrome browser. Let that sink in for a second. All you have is a Google Chrome browser. There are slight modifications such as a battery icon and a WiFi icon in the top right corner. There’s also what is referred to as “Panels” at the bottom of the screen. So far I’ve only noticed notifications and GoogleTalk as the two items that use the panel. They are nifty however it’s difficult to determine if you have any panels open at the bottom of the screen because the panels are hard to discern if there’s a website with a white background (most of the internet). You can drag around the panels and move them around, but as I mentioned above the trackpad is awful and as a result the idea of moving a panel from left to right is almost impossible. Other-then-that that’s basically it.
That’s what the Chrome OS boils down to, a large browser window where the tabs you open are essentially either websites or web applications. Because I use Google Chrome as my default browser, I have browser sync setup. This just lets applications, bookmarks, extensions, settings, i.e. your profile sync between computers. As a result, after a few minutes all my settings and extensions sync’d to the Chrome OS and I had everything that I would need to complete surfing the web. It did take a few moments to complete the sync actually it took long enough that I was able to file a bug-report complaining of my inability to sync.

Again, Google Chrome OS in its real simple form boils down to the Google Chrome browser. If you think about that, it really is rather an odd way to look at the computer. The initial impression of the experience left me feeling “weird”. Initially I didn’t know what to do. I just started testing a bunch of websites. All of which loaded with relative ease and I was initially impressed with the performance. That is until I started using anything related to Flash. It was immediately apparent that Flash was not optimized for the hardware in the Cr48. YouTube and Hulu load videos fine and at times work OK. But more often than not the videos tend to be choppy and some other times look like stop-motion. There has been only a few times where I’ve noticed that Flash video is completely unbearable to watch but in general it’s, please mind my Bostonion slang, wicked slow.

Once you start opening a bunch of tabs you’ll notice performance implications immediately. What’s noticeable is a slowdown of loading sites and of clicking around especially if you have a few flash sites open in some of the tabs. Yesterday evening I was running ‘Yahoo Fantasy Stat Tracker” and “Grooveshark” while having Google Reader, Gmail, Google Docs, and ESPN.com open. There was a noticeable slowdown switching between tabs. It’s hard to complain about such things because at the end the performance implications will really be based on the hardware that OEM’s will use to build these notebooks.

Finally, I had a chance to use the webcam w/ GoogleTalk. Again the hardware/software marriage here on this test device isn’t that great. As a result the user on the other-end was disturbingly choppy and the audio wasn’t that great. I also appeared like a stop-motion character during our conversation. I’m not sure if that’s just the case with GoogleTalk’s video-chat plugin but it was absolutely unusable from my point of view.

Again, it’s important to stress that this hardware is just for test purposes and shouldn’t be the sole judge of how Chrome OS will be in the future. Especially, since the OS isn’t finalized yet. I still need to test out a bunch of other things such as the SD-Card reader. But in general there are a lot of positives to take away from the device especially the simplicity in nature of such a device. This is really what I imagined a netbook to be. Something that’s connected to the cloud, no matter what laptops you log into you have all your data immediately available to you.

So what could it be then?  Well, MacRumors has a post saying the Wallstreet Journal all but confirmed that “The Beatles” are finally coming to iTunes.  That type of announcement seems to be perfect for Apple to do via the web.  On top of it, there seems to be some very apparent sneaky Apple-like hints on the splash page as MacRumors pointed out.

So while this isn’t an announcement for iTunes streaming, which is definitely at some point or another coming, it’s still a significant announcement for music distribution.

“Decisions you made [at Verizon] are decisions we would make at Apple.”

via Get ready for Verizons Dream Phone – Fortune Tech.

This article doesn’t shed much more light then what has already been written about. But I thought that quote says a lot about the future partnership between Apple and Verizon.

The one thing that I’m interested to find out is ‘How will Verizon’s network react to the iPhone?’ We know that AT&T’s network, while sub-standard in the eyes of many, fell to its knees because of the iPhone. It wasn’t the network that sucked, the iPhone and the usage of the phone on AT&T is what made the network suck significantly. Time will tell.

We are short on details, and we have not seen any public information about it, but it sounds like this will be a more intimate version of the iPhone Tech Talks that Apple hosted around the world last year.

Makes sense to me that they are trying to keep developers happy. I find it odd that it will be ‘only’ just that. Obviously I’m just speculating here but I think there could be three potential reasons for this summit, besides the obvious intimate tech talk.

1. Informing select developers on changes to the next iOS (4.5 or 5.0) However, it’s too early for any announcement regarding the next big update, this usually occurs during the March, April time frame. But maybe there are some significant changes happening?

2. Getting ‘significant’ developers together to put together teams to build tech-demos for the next iPad. If we are to follow the typical Apple release/announcement cycle, it would mean that an announcement of the new iPad would be coming in the January time-frame.

3. Trying to get iOS developers to begin creating Mac applications for the Mac App Store. They could be using this summit to push the Mac App Store to these iOS developers in hopes that they can build significant apps that Apple can then show off.

Again just speculation here.

Windows Phone 7 is elegantly executed, incredibly intuitive, and straight-up beautiful at times. What it’s not, relative to the competition, is complete. The things it does, it does well — but the things that it doesn’t yet, tend to stick out. These things — third party app multitasking, copy and paste, or tethering — are things that people complained about other mobile operating systems lacking a year and a half ago.

via Review: Windows Phone 7.

Sad that Microsoft is so late to the party. The UI looks so elegant and so anti-Microsoft that it definitely intrigues me. I’d love to test one of these out. However, Microsoft is not only late to the party, they are late and incomplete to the party. All the things they are missing are the things the iPhone was missing on day one. Apple, to a point (I still feel multi-tasking on an iPhone is a cop out), has taken a long time, 3+ years, to get these things fixed or updated but they have.

Not to say I wouldn’t love to test one so Microsoft if you’re reading this, which is highly doubtful, send me one .

Steve Jobs is right, the real question is: What’s best for the customer? Some people like to have options. Not everyone likes iPhone’s form factor, iPhone’s interface and some may even want a hardware keyboard, a custom virtual keyboard or a weather widget. Android is a diverse ecosystem and there’s a lot to learn until Google, hardware manufacturers and all their partners manage to come up with revolutionary phones, consistent interfaces and integrated experiences. Android is just an opportunity to innovate, it’s not a complete package. Google chose a non-restrictive license for Android to encourage innovation, even if that meant less control and more fragmentation.

Mobile phones are more personal than computers and I don’t think we’ll live in a world where every smartphone user will choose an iPhone. There’s always a trade-off and not everyone wants a perfect phone if that means they’ll have to change their definition of a perfect phone.

I’m not a Google hater. I think the Android has a lot of pros. Although, the issue for me on a mobile phone comes down to a few things.

1.) Experience: If I’m dealing with an android device, the experience I get on an HTC Evo vs the experience I get on a Droid is completely different. I’m not even talking about the interface, I’m talking about how the hardware and software interact. How one phone isn’t as sensitive to touch as another or at the very least the performance of one vs. the other.

2.) Development: Look fragmentation makes development much much harder. If you have a different UI on each Android device, if you make each Android device significantly different in hardware specs, then you require developers to test their applications on each device. You make the end-user experience with the UI that much worse. I’m not saying we need one UI or one device, however I’m saying that there needs to be some guidelines. If user A uses Twitter on the Evo and then uses it on the Droid, you want to make sure the experience is equal. That’s where the Windows vs. Android comparison ends. Because UI on a Windows OS, no matter if it’s a HP or a Dell is going to be similar. Thus UI development and design on Windows becomes significantly easier because you know what you’ll as UI experience on each Windows device. Performance might be different due to hardware changes, but in general you’re testing under minimum requirements. The term minimum requirements should not be part of the mobile vocabulary for an end-user. However, maybe minimum requirements should become a general Android term for manufacturers.

The first thing I noticed when I took this technical marvel out of its box is the form-factor and size. Unlike its predecessor the iPhone 4 does not feel like a piece of plastic. Every single minute detail is beautifully crafted in a way that only Apple could do. The phone feels perfect in my hands. And it’s down right amazing how much Apple has been able to pack into such a thin case.

The second thing I noticed is the screen. I can’t say enough about the “Retina Display”. I don’t know how to put into words what it’s like to look at this screen. One has to see the screen at work to appreciate it.

One of the, I won’t say downsides instead let’s say repercussions of the screen is that it makes the iPads screen look inferior. Another repercussion of the new iPhone 4 is that it uses iOS 4.0 which the iPad currently doesn’t… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to double click home on the iPad hoping to see the fast-switch bar pop-up.

The major issue I’ve noticed is the signal degradation problem associated to the ‘death-grip’. I’ve noticed it at work but not at my apartment. I’m hoping that Apple will somehow fix this…

The problem with the new editor is that it lacks many features that were previously available in Google Docs: translation, editing CSS and HTML, document settings, custom dictionary, comparing revisions etc. These features will probably be added to the new editor, but users expect to find new features in a major update, not missing features.

Another issue is that most documents will open in the old editor, while recent documents will open in the new editor. Google will offer an option to migrate the existing documents to the new format, but users shouldnt have to deal with converting between formats.

It’s going to be a kick in the pants to a lot of people who will be migrated to the new editor.