No mic jack?

I was (trying to) watch some videos while on the train tonight (the train WiFi was just too slow) when I realized there isn't a mic jack on the Cr-48.  There is an integrated mic next to the camera; but, when wearing a headset, it would be preferable to have a jack for the mic on the headset.  Not exactly a major issue, but it couldn't possibly be that difficult to include two jacks for a headset.

More display flickering

I had another automatic backlight control issue this morning.  A cat hair was laying directly across the camera lens, which was making the display flicker - especially at the top of the screen.  Apparently, the part-dark, part-light image going to the camera was really confusing the backlight dimming algorithm.  I removed the hair and the flickering stopped.  I'm not sure the automatic backlight dimming is worth the problems it seems to have with bright lights being periodically blocked by shadow and by things like hair or dirt getting on the camera lens.

On the road...

Today was the first day I took the Cr-48 with me on my commute to work.  It was very smooth in transitioning from WiFi to 3G as I took it away from wireless hotspots.  The 3G worked very well throughout the commute, with a few gaps in coverage that I anticipated (my phone drops out there, as well).  Speeds were good and Chrome dealt well with the dropouts, buffering pending actions until the connection was reestablished. Reconnections were effortless, as well.  The bars came up, the 3G icon went green and the pending actions were processed.  When I got home, it connected right back to my wireless network.  I was quite impressed!

Remaining battery indication

Ran the battery all the way out yesterday, only to discover that the notification that Chrome pops up isn't accurate.  It counted down from 15 minutes to 7 minutes - and then shut down with no further warnings.  Did get some awesome battery life up until then, though.  The Cr-48 was off the charger for 12 hours and in pretty steady use by both my daughter and myself.  The active usage was easily 8+ hours.

Guest blog from my daughter

I let my daughter use the Cr-48 while she was visiting today.  Here are her thoughts:

The Cr-48 is a portable and sleek machine, but it comes with its share of problems. The right click function is usually activated by tapping the touch pad with two fingers, however as a young woman I had to use three fingers to get this function to work as it couldn't detect my smaller fingers. This was often frustrating, especially when the computer would just open the link I was clicking on in the current tab rather than allowing me to right click and open a new one. The browser being the only operating system is confusing and sometimes inconvenient, especially when you need to use applications like the calculator (instead you'll have to type out your equations in the search bar). Additionally signing in on a different email address makes the machine sync the info associated with that address, which can be troublesome when you log onto someone's computer and suddenly they're getting your Amazon.com product suggestions. However the machine has a good battery life, runs smoothly and seems to have a lot of potential.

Battery Life

I'm very impressed by the battery life on this notebook.  I've had it off the charger all day - and while I haven't been using it continually - I have been using it quite a bit on and off throughout the day.  After nearly 24 hours, there is still about a quarter of the charge left.  I'll have to remember to time my usage the next time I pull it off the charger to see how long the battery lasts while the Cr-48 is in use.  Pretty impressive so far!

The Backlight Keeps Flickering!

I discovered one of the features of the Cr-48 that kind of surprised me this evening.  It's probably documented somewhere, but I discovered it through experimentation.  The webcam acts as an ambient light sensor, so it dims the backlight on the LCD as the ambient light on the webcam dims.  This is a good idea, I think.  I've often been nearly blinded using a laptop in a mostly dark room that had the backlight set for use outside; however, I didn't expect the automatic adjustment.  I have a ceiling light that is behind me in the room where I've been using the Cr-48. After sunset, I turned the room light on and started to notice that the backlight kept getting brighter and dimmer as I was typing.  It was starting to drive me crazy!  Then I noticed that the backlight dimmed when my shadow covered the webcam and got brighter if I moved back so that my shadow wasn't cast on the webcam.  I happened to be sitting in a position where just a little rocking back and forth as I typed was moving my shadow on and off of the camera.  Good thing to know, because I was about to submit a bug report about the maddening flickering of the backlight!  I'd imagine there may be a setting to disable the automatic adjustment of the backlight, but it's not readily apparent.  I'll have to look into this some more.

Setup and First Impressions

Well, I finally got my Cr-48 hooked up to my local wi-fi and spent a few hours working with it. The setup was pretty straight-forward, but it would be nice to be able to edit the owning user account after you've created it. This is a capability that Google is adding, but it isn't available yet.  As long as you don't need to know the MAC address or any other hardware information about the Cr-48 the setup is a really simple 4 steps: connect to the network, log in to your Google account, accept the user agreement, and take your user profile photo - after that, you're in.

The buttonless touchpad took a little while to get used to, but I'm actually starting to like it.  It is very responsive to the touch and the tap sensitivity is pretty good.  The only time I've had to do a "hard tap" (where you push down on the touchpad surface to "click" it) was to do a drag and drop.  There may be an alternate method, but I haven't found it.

The dedicated web and device buttons on the top row are a nice replacement for the rarely used function keys. It's nice to have direct access to the brightness and volume controls without pressing multiple keys. I do really miss the delete key, though!  (It only has a backspace key.)

The Chrome store seems to have a lot of nice free apps you can add to the home page, in addition to the suggested apps that are preloaded.  I added Google Docs, Google Books, Planetarium, and NPR for Chrome.  All of them were simple to add and seem to work really well, so far.

I'm going to try to use this laptop as my primary machine during this pilot period and I'll post my (mis)adventures using the Cr-48 Chrome notebook as I attempt to live in the Google cloud.  Stay tuned!