Tuesday, 28 January 2014

So i got myself a Chromebook

Out of sheer curiosity, i got myself a Samsung Chromebook, Model 3, eleven inch screen. The form factor was right, the weight seems right, the price point is right. Hopefully, the wife acceptance factor is alright too – she just got her first Android phone so accessing her stuff on a laptop should appeal.

I too have most of my personal and social life in the googleverse, so no wonder i was intrigued by a browser with a keyboard attached to it. Thankfully, you can get both ssh and mosh as windowed applications to it. There’s even a Terminal app, though it seems to be running on a virtual machine at Koding (which in itself is a nice surprise – i haven’t used Koding for a while but this might just inspire me to!)

The form factor of the Samsung is comparable to my mac, the keyboard is a bit stiffer and feels a bit strange despite being quite bearable for a machine at this price point. But despite the similar looks, it surely is no mac (but hey, what do you expect for 15-20% of the price of a Macbook pro :)

The most glaring difference is the display. The resolution is a mere 1366x768 and if there existed a chromebook at a fairly regular price with 1920x1080 HD resolution, i’d pay the difference in a jiffy. Another pretty obvious difference is speed. An Intel i-series processor and 16 GB of memory is no match to this puppy, but then, i wasn’t expecting a match. And it’s plasticky, not aluminium.

But put in another way, you get quite a lot of laptop for three hundred bucks.

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