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!
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