Chromebook Series 5 Review

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The new Chromebooks are much improved devices, but they’re still ahead of their time says Matt Warman

 

Google’s Chrome OS is a great idea: if everything important can be done in the cloud, why not have lightweight devices that provide cheap, easy access to enormous computing power but don’t burden their users with unnecessary features unless they specifically want them. The web, too, means that the OS can constantly update itself to the latest version, just as the Chrome or now Internet Explorer web browsers do.

And indeed, the new Chromebook in particular is a nice enough machine – it retains the redesigned Chrome OS keyboard, with a search button replacing the caps lock key (now accessed via a keyboard shortcut), but using a nicer, albeit still placticky device. The screen, again, is good enough, and there is a good range of ports to connect other devices too, such as monitors or peripherals.

On paper, this all seems perfectly good, but in the real world the approach falls down. The apps button brings up whatever you’ve downloaded, but if you’re not online gmail doesn’t even route through automatically to the Offline Gmail app. Opening documents offline was temperamental in the extreme, sometimes working but mostly saying ‘Sorry, this document could not be opened’. Without a web connection, clicking ‘Learn more’ also yielded nothing.

The great advantage of Chrome OS is that as Google fixes these problems, then all users will benefit, for nothing. And they will still get the excellent, seven hours or so of battery life.

The sad thing remains, however, that these devices are neither cheap enough nor beautiful enough to yet attract consumers. Samsung’s lovely series 9, for instance, crams in far more gadgetry into an attractive deisgn; either the plasticky chromebook is either aimed at schoolchildren and employees who get what they’re given, or Samsung isn’t trying very hard; to gain mass appeal Chromebooks need a unique selling point.

The Chromebox, meanwhile, makes a lovely media centre, plugged into a TV and providing streaming access to the iPlayer, films via YouTube and much more, plus a full web experience on your TV. The market for this may be just a niche but it is a sizeable one.

Google is, to be fair, not yet fool enough to think the Chromebook can be everything – they’ve built a remote desktop app to let you log on to a PC over the web. But until all machines are virtualised and can be easily accessed remotely, that’s an imperfect halfway solution.

Yet it eems inevitable that infrastructure and IT will catch up with the Chromebook. As computing, from Windows 8 to Apple’s iCloud, is getting self-evidently cloudier, so Chrome OS’s time is coming. For certain tasks, the Chromebook is even my favourite device thanks to that battery life, the very fast booting time and speed at which it works. Google may yet just time its maturity perfectly for when the web comes into a new age, and it’s certainly ahead of the pack now.

Source: Telegram (UK)

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