"Installed" some games from the Chrome Apps Store. (An installation is really just creating an icon for the URL on the Chrome OS home page.) Some fun games available there: some great old Atari classics (that I can sadly remember spending many a quarter on and playing on my Atari 800 and 2600), the World Golf Tour golf games, Lord of Ultima, and Shredder Chess (a great chess game). I also tried the two pre-installed games: Entanglement and Poppit. Both very addictive!
There were some issues. For example, on the Atari games, the control buttons block the game display when in full screen mode. I suspect this is more an issue with Atari than Chrome. Another problem was going to Pogo.com (the host site for Poppit) to play some of their other games. The site popped up an alert box that Java needed to be installed. How do you install Java for Chrome OS? It shouldn't be possible (except perhaps as a temporary install) given the architecture of the Chrome sandbox. Granted, I could force it by booting the notebook to Linux using the USB port, but for this evaluation period I am trying to keep the Chrome installation pure to get a feel for how the typical end user would make use of the machine. It is certainly a limitation that you wouldn't have with any other notebook. But it does support what I see as the biggest niche for a machine like the Cr-48: corporate notebooks for a company that has gone to an external or internal cloud architecture for their IT. Having been a network admin and having provided tech support for internet appliances, I see the inability for users to make significant changes to their machines, especially installing executables, and the ability to update and backup applications and data in the cloud as the real strength of this computing model.
Speaking of games, I noticed the latest release of Chrome OS hasn't incorporated WebGL yet. I hope that WebGL will be added to the stable Chrome release soon, because I'd really like to try out the new 3D content!
No comments:
Post a Comment