Home in the Cloud

Three days ago I received a marvelous gift from Google in the form of my very own CR-48 notebook.  In December I had submitted my application to the Chrome OS pilot program, crossed my fingers, and a half dozen weeks later was lucky enough to receive my very own chrome notebook, and it is amazing.

This stealth notebook comes complete with a fledgling operating system (chrome os) that is proving to be powerful enough for all my everyday computing needs.  The boot time is remarkable, with the removal of standard operating system boot bloat, Chrome OS is running in ~10 seconds.  There are plenty of sites discussing the specifications of this device in detail, and I am not going to review the device here.   Other reviews state this device and the Chrome OS are dead in the water, but so far I have to disagree.  I can see a bright future for a fast, affordable, notebook with a lightweight operating system designed so that no matter what my location, I am able to connect to the cloud quickly and accomplish all the tasks I need to. I am going to push this device to it limit and see what, if any, limitations it has.

I have been courting the cloud for some time, working in Google Docs, syncing photos to the web with Picasa, and loading a lightweight linux distro on an old HP laptop for nothing but netbook purposes, but now with the chrome notebook and Chrome OS I am going for a more committed relationship, attempting to detach myself completely (or as much as possible) from the standard operating system and live in the cloud.