10 Days with Chromebooks

I now spent ten days with my  Chromebook. Pardon me, it is actually Chromebooks. It didn’t take me long to realize, that this is a device that is better off connected, and so I purchased yet another one, this time with 3G ((XE303C12-H01DE, as Samsung call it, the other one (slightly better build, slightly better screen, slightly better battery life) is going back where it came from (eBay) )).

I quickly went “Bleeding edge”. In fact, I find the development alphas stable enough. And I put my Chromebook in dev mode to crouton it. What I mean: I installed a Chroot environment of Ubuntu Raring (13.04) with LXDE. Works great, too, and it is certainly great to be able to run LibreOffice for some documents or Firefox for the fun of it ((Firefox on a Chromebook + Chrome on a Firefox OS smartphone… That would be fun.)). On the other hand, I can’t get DVD playback (video) to work, which might actually a kernel related thing (I really have no idea), and so I will try out the other “real standard Linux” option, Chrubuntu, rather soon.

What else happened? Not much. The iPad is catching dust. I hate booting up my Thinkpad Edge ((Lenovo E320)), because it is so heavy and has worse input devices. Unfortunately, it does not really feel much speedier, either. But let’s get back to the iPad. With the Chromebook loaded with my Data SIM (and thus the iPad 2 being forced on WiFi) the iPad is a lot less useful on the go. The only app I miss on the Chromebook is Salvatore Rizzi’s Reeder, but I could really move my data into one of the more beautiful Google Reader Feedly alternatives like Feedbin.

So the iPad is still in my daily bag. It is with me on the both commutes and during lunch break, but I rarely touch it. Everything I want to do works well enough on the Chromebook so I don’t bother taking the iPad out of my bag. In fact, I think that I will need to take my hacked Barnes&Noble Nook Simple Touch with me. A smaller form factor could actually add something. But then I might as well replace the Nook by something else…