I have since read that others have had this same surprise as their notebooks have arrived.  There was no advanced notification to expect the notebook and no emails with tracking information, etc.  So, the surprise factor just makes the entire experience all the more exciting.

So far, the laptop and OS live up to the expections I had based on my reading.  The laptop is almost instant on to boot.  It is graphical from the first moment it turns on.  It was very quick to get up and running – just 4 easy steps to set it up.  The laptop also includes both wireless and 3G data connectivity.  Once started, you’re prompted to connect to the Internet so that you login with our Google account.  You snap a quick picture of yourself using the integrated camera and then you’re all logged in and ready to work (or play).   Your GMail, calendar, Picasa web gallery, and all other Google Apps are instantly available to you.  All changes you make on the Chrome OS are automatically synced to the Google cloud, including bookmarks, themes and extension.   I have even noticed that these settings are replicated to my Chrome browser on Windows and Mac.  Sync takes no extra time or thought.  It is certainly handy and it is enabled by default in Chrome OS (in Chrome browser for Windows or Mac, its a feature you must enable).

After using it for a while, I can say, its made a believer out of me. I can see it as a viable laptop for several group so people.  And, I’m not just saying it because I received a free laptop.  But, I can say it may not be for everyone.

Several years ago, I made the GMail transition for my primary email and I found myself slowly, over time, using my Apple Mail desktop program less and less and using GMail’s web interface everywhere I went.  I became accustomed to it and it did everything I needed from my email – sometimes even better than the desktop programs.  So, I was already well prepared by having my email in the Google cloud.

I also began using Google Docs after their introduction and I have found myself using Microsoft Office less and less – primarily because I can share my Google Docs with co-workers and family as we create content that we need to share.  Anything I have created in a Word or Excel doc was ultimately for record keeping or number crunching for a project (like my home build) or for our family (like medical expense tracking).  All of these documents are really useful to be shared with my wife in real-time.

I bring those two points to the table to say that many people have not made the transition to the cloud for all of their primary applications and for them, Chrome OS may not be viable.  Google even states on their website that Chrome OS is for “for people who live on the web“.  (Check out the link to take their quiz to see if Chrome OS is right for you.)  Its not going to run any other local programs except those that run from the cloud or inside of a web browser.

For a recreational or occasional user, I can certainly say that this is an excellent choice for a computer.  For someone who wants to check email, who wants to Facebook and who wants to surf the internet, this is an excellent appliance.  I choose the word appliance because its a single purpose device – to use the Internet.  I also say its perfectly suited for a recreational or occasional user because it lacks the complexity of Windows, which I find to be a huge burden on most PC users.  It also lacks all of the complexity of a Mac — yes, Macs can be complex, too.  There, I said it.  Chrome OS is a very simple Linux implementation that does its intended purpose very well.

As a matter of fact, as I was riding home that evening using the 3G network for the first time, I quickly came to the conclusion that this would be the perfect thing for my mom or my aunt who mentioned wanting to buy and have me help her setup a computer (yikes!).   DSL is pricey for my parent’s (very very rural) area, so its not worth a subscription for their occasional use.  I have usually relied on dial up while there, but most recently we’ve been forced to use extended family member’s DSL when we needed Internet while visiting.  But for the first time, I think the CR-48 is a great choice for them to use – with bundled cellular wireless.

I also think that its an excellent travel laptop for almost anyone for a couple reasons.  First, you don’t have to worry about confidential data being lost on the laptop.  If you lose the laptop, all your data is safely in the cloud.  You can even require a password to wake from sleep as a extra level of protection.  A remote wipe or even “Find My Chrome Notebook” feature, similar to Apple’s “Find My iPhone” feature would be a welcome addition, but would require a GPS.    The second reason is rather simple – the hardware of the Chrome notebook makes it perfect for travel.  Its small, lightweight and has integrated 3G wireless inside.  Plus, the occasional traveler can use the free, bundled 100MB of data per month on their trips.  For a trip where you need to do more, Verizon Wireless is offering a $9.99 per day option with unlimited data or a montly 1G, 2G, etc. packages you can pay for in additional to your 100MB of free data.

Some things I have not tried, yet due to lack for time.  I need to try and load  photos into Picasa Web using the CR-48.  I am not sure if the notebook will recognize my camera or my SD cards – so that is a test to be done this weekend.  I also need to get Google Cloud Print setup at some point.  Right now, I’m all Mac, so Cloud Print is not an option for me.  I do like the way that Google is setting up Cloud Print.  It is bundled with the Google Chrome browser.  [What other things should I test?  Please leave comments...]

From my couple days of testing, I am able to watch flash video online (even video from NBC and CBS works well) and the performance of the laptop is fantastic.  The solid state storage is great and provides nearly instant boot and instant on from sleep.

A little reading online indicates that the chipset inside is actually compatible with UMTS/HSPA wireless networks also – like AT&T (or my primary workplace – HTC).  Apparently, the code for the GSM network is not fully baked, but I hope this means we will be able to eventually use it on a GSM network.  There is even a place to insert a SIM card underneath the battery.    One could hope that maybe I can experiment with that with AT&T in the future.

The information for WSJ is pretty details – and you should check it out yourself:  http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/

Jen and I have been toying with the idea of downgrading our cable at home (since we tend to only watch stuff we DVR after it has already aired) and many of these things are already on Hulu, ABC.com and other sources for free.  We would be joining a couple of our friends who have cut the cable, so to speak.  That said, I work for a cable TV provider (as well as Telephone, Cellular and Internet), so I get a decent discount on service — so the jury is out of what exactly we will decide to do.  For now, this is an experiment and if nothing else, perhaps I can report my findings back to work about new cable alternatives.

First, let me say, hooking up the Mac Mini was a breeze.  The HDMI interface makes it a snap to have it up and running on the TV.  I also purchased a bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad.  While the keyboard paired with the new Mini out of the box, the Magic Trackpad was more troublesome.  I had to add a USB mouse initially to get the Mini up to the needed patch level and then I had to manually install the Magic Trackpad software from the Apple website.  It was not a big deal, I was hoping for a zero problem bluetooth installation.  I will say, however, that a future OS release will likely solve that problem by bundling the software.  Magic Trackpad is a brand new device and its software will eventually make it into the OS X images used in the factories.

My next discovery wass Plex – http://www.plexapp.com – which is an alternative and I dare say superior media competitor to Boxee, Hulu Desktop and Apple’s Front Row.  Plex is a great interface and offers a extensible plugin architecture for to access other online resources.  Currently it allows for access to Apple’s Movie Trailers, CNet, FoxNews, MSNBC and even Hulu from within its application.  It also offers full integration with the Apple iTunes libraries of media for viewing.    I am still in my first few days of testing this, but I have set it to autostart with the Mac Mini making it almost seamless to use the Mini as a media center.  This software seems light years ahead of Microsoft and even edges Boxee, by offering a fluid interface for all these other resources that works the same regardless of what internet library you are attaching to.  The Plex team is clearly paying attention to human interfacing with their software.

I have also tested Hulu Desktop and Front Row on the TV connected Mac Mini.  Both work just as well here as they do on a desktop or laptop – no real surprises, nothing exciting.

I will likely install the latest Boxee on here and test it to, though I have not done this to date.  Unfortunately, since purchasing the Mini, I have only set it up and used it a few short hours, due to a family emergency which has had me out of town.

Also since my first post on IPTV, the Steve (as in Jobs) presented a new Apple TV at the keynote last week.  I was under-impressed with the new device.  I think for the mass market, streaming make perfect sense and adding Netflix is an absolute necessity for Apple.  But I think that the rent-only market won’t be appealing  to many users who still like to own their media (myself included).  The Steve mentioned that most users don’t want a full blown computer running on their TV sets, and I agree with that.  For mass adoption, I think Apple may be tracking towards the right path.  But their offering of online media libraries is still very anemic and due to this, I think the new incarnation of the Apple TV will still see “hobby” success.  The price point is right for the device and revelation that it too based on the custom A4 processor hopefully signals that Apple may open the platform to third party developers (like Hulu) and others to deliver their content.

I had been worried about losing my digital home movies.  That data is really too large to really push out to a backup service like Mozy and when I load new movies, its usually to the tune of 20 or 30GB at a time, which would take weeks to push up.  In addition to that data, I also have Movies and TV shows that we have purchased through iTunes.

So, I knew that I wanted some sort of external storage with at least mirroring capabilities to protect the movies as best I could.  Back in January, I was close to buying a Western Digital mirrored external hard drive from the Apple store.  I chose instead to get a 1TB, single external drive with Firewire as an upgrade to my 500GB Time Machine which was almost full, and wait for a better solution.

Since it was first released, I have always been in love with the Drobo.  I describe it as an mini-EVA to my co-workers, because it mirrors a lot of the HP Storageworks EVA functionality – like drives auto-leveling and automatically striping data across disks in the disk group.  Maybe, I just like the idea of having something that advanced attached to my home computers…  and I’ll be the first to admit that they don’t compare — they are apples and oranges.

But I do love what the Drobo offers, and so I have been watching them for some time.  Since its introduction, the Drobo had gone from a single device with USB only, to an enhanced version which has USB2 and Firewire (my choice of devices), a version which adds eSATA with USB and Firewire, and several larger devices, the Drobo Elite and the Drobo Pro, which feature iSCSI and NAS functionality targeted towards SMB’s.

As a side note, the Drobo Pro is even VMware certified, and I feel like it is a great solution for small to medium businesses looking for shared storage for an vSphere deployment.  This past week, we attended the Charlotte Regional VMware Users Group meeting, and actually got to see one of the Drobo Elite units on display.

The price has held steady on the Drobo that I have been watching.  At a $399 price point, I couldn’t justify buying it and then having to purchase drives to go inside.  But, as I said before, B&H was offering a great deal – the Drobo device at $100 off its normal MSRP.  It was a good $50 less than I could find it anywhere else, and so I bit — err bought.  I was able to equip it with two Western Digital Caviar Green (my wife would be proud) 1TB drives from NewEgg for a cost of $138.  And so, last night I finished up my transition of data and have everything I wanted protected on the Drobo – and I’m happy…

My friends and I have created a few waves and now that the novelty has worn off, I’m left with the question of where this fits?  Its not instant messaging, per say, and it is more collaborative, but I’ve found it frustrating (perhaps because of a lack of friends on Wave) to try and carry on a conversation with someone in Wave.

But, I recall being the same way with GMail when I first got access to its beta program.   Early on, I despised the conversation view I now love in GMail and I couldn’t understand why Google would launch a new chat – as if I needed another one.  But those things quickly became assets to the platform that Google was building.

Wave is largely a re-think platform.  It is exciting that it can be extended and built upon to bring new tools to the table.  The playback feature is a good one that allows for all the communication to happen on the server and be stored there.  It is a convergence for email and instant message.

What is great about the hosted message platform is it removes the need for transport – the biggest problem facing email today.  I think that moving forward, a hosted conversation may be a much better way of communicating, but at this point – its only hosted by a single provider.  The beauty of email is that everyone can host their own or outsource their email server.  And if one goes down, the rest of the system survives.  Its architecture is distinctly different than Wave.

But Wave offers the opportunity to define a secure and verified transport between Wave providers.  Google seems to be supporting this to become an open standard for the world to use – not a closed system which Google controls.

And while discussing transport, regulation has become a major issue facing email today.  From HIPPA to SOX, government regulation now dictates how information can be disseminated.  A newly architected platform over secure connections could provide a much needed alternative to the largely insecure email used today.

So there is a lot about the system which offers promise, but it is different animal all together.  I can see how this could converge into Google Docs and offer similar collaboration that word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents offer in that silo.    I can also see how this could neatly fit as a secure email replacement.  I’m interested to see what other think or envision for Wave.

I still seem to be finding my voice – finding my topic – and I guess that’s part of the journey.  I have always enjoyed writing, though I’m not sure my prose is particularly interesting to read, its something I will continue to try and refine.  My first year has been marked with posts about the work I’m currently doing and new projects I’m undertaking.   I started with a focus on two core topics – VMware and Apple stuff – and I’ve kinda stuck to those.  I expanded with my personal experiences with Mac finance software and some other topics, but early on, I got a lot of hits from my VMworld posts.  I hope to do this again this year at the conference.

Anyways, bear with me as I continue to figure out how to effectively do this – as I found out what people find useful or interesting – and as I continue to share my experiences from a sys admin’s world.

1) Music – we’re a world accustomed to iTunes and buying our music online.  Where will that fit?  How will it — or simply will Chrome OS handle media files?

2) Video – Sure, like music, what about video playback?  YouTube is great, but there aren’t any video editing tools online as part of YouTube – you have to somehow capture and piece together your videos.   I’ve never encountered an online video editing software (yet…).

3) Gaming – Sure EA is making some of their games available online and it is generally accepted for game consoles to have online portals to download games – but how will Chrome OS accomplish this?  Will it shy away from this on its underpowered hardware ?

4) Photo editing  - Sure, Google has Picasa, but will it be packaged with Chrome OS?  It has Picasaweb, but its features are currently very limited and its space is also.

What else am I missing – I’m sure there is more…

It is a natural extension of the cloud platform that Google has been developing for years, and an evolutionary step for Google.  Until the introduction of Chrome, the browser, Google was largely at the mercy of third-party browser developers.   And while it shocked many that Google introduced their own browser, it made sense to control the main interface to their products and to be able to control that experience.  Apple has used the same, successful model in their business controlling the end to end of their user experience and its garned them a lot of success.

Google hails Chrome OS as a lighweight, open-source OS alternative.  Its key focuses are speed, security and simplicity.  Those three factors may put it well above the Windows learning curve, where viruses and malware are a major headache, speed is laughable (at least in the Vista releases) and the interface has grown disparate and confusing.

The product announcement indicates that the OS won’t be available until second half of 2010, and that may be its biggest hurdle.  That gives Microsoft and Apple a year to develop and beat Google to market with devices which fill this area.  And that is perhaps the biggest head-scratcher.  Linux is there and there are current windowing environments which could be leveraged to quickly move this project to market, so why take until 2010 and also why give this much pre-warning to your competitors?  Several reports I read yesterday hailed this as doomsday for Microsoft.  Time will tell.  Others said this won’t affect Apple, but that’s hard to believe too.  While Apple seems largely uninterested in netbooks – the inital target of Chrome OS, its hard not to think that this may apply to larger form factors.

I can’t help but think how similiar this really is to the old mainframe days and green-screen terminals.  All the processing is done back in a datacenter somewhere and just the screens are being piped to the user.  Everything is cyclical and here we go again.  I guess the big difference is that now processing is done on clusters of every-day hardware instead of multi-million dollar, monolitical machines.

Another byproduct of the announcement is the close working relationship of Apple and Google.  Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, even sits on Apple’s board of directors.  It is hard to see who this isn’t and won’t become an even bigger conflict of interest for him.  I think his days on the board are probably numbered.  And as smart as it was to include some killer Google apps in iPhone form, the decision to keep Microsoft compatibility and even Yahoo (hey, the got push email) in the iPhone looks smarter and smarter on Apple’s part.

Consumers are the clear winner from this, however.  Google has a long history for creating great, free software and supporting it with ad revenue driven by its core search service.  With that business model, the OS will likely not be much more than a browser and maybe a couple other applications and the web being the star of this show.   This is a clear departure from Windows, Mac OS X and even Linux desktop OS’es of today.  The timing is good too, with the advent and popularity of netbooks.  Telecoms are looking to bundle their internet service with netbooks and push the same subsidized hardware/internet service combination we’re accustomed to with our cell phones.

That’s not to say Chrome OS won’t face some problems.   Apple tried a similar approach when launching the initial iPhone.  One year later, they back-peddled and introduced native apps because customers were unhappy with the Internet only applications currently available.  They longed for the offline and native speed interactivity of applications.  But a netbook is a different form-factor than a phone, so it may work better for this type of device.

Even though Google is now taking control over its destiny in regards to the terminal used to access its services, its now going to be at the disposal of the network provided with these netbooks.  Sure, WIFI connections will be speedy, but Google will face similiar problems with wireless internet via cell networks that Apple and other hardware vendors face.  And, mobile internet isn’t fully baked in my opinion.  There are still lots of areas without service throughout the country and places where the service available is doggedly slow.  Its an adequate trade off in an emerging market – the mobile internet service will eventually get better.

I guess I should back up.  When I came across Moblin, it initially looks really promising from the screenshots.  The interface was intuitive and looked more like a large mobile phone type interface than anything I’d seen on a miniature desktop.  To me, it looked pretty well suited for the tween size of a laptop.

On first boot, the interface was much better than I had initially expected.  The 3D transitions and effects were pretty well integrated and someone has spent a lot of time working out the intricacies of this Linux desktop.

You can’t do alot from the live USB – its mostly an installer method, but you do get a good sense of what this software can do, and it looks good.  You have to change your thinking a bit (not hard for a thinking different Mac person to do) and understand that there is no desktop and that your applications live in zones.  Beyond that, the launcher bar (for lack of a better term) is your central location for switching contexts and zones to move between your applications and settings.  Its pretty efficient and has an autohide feature (a la OS X’s Dock) which saves the screen real estate.  Jamie wasn’t interested in installing, so some features weren’t easy to test.

Moblin features a status channel – with integrated Twitter and Last.fm support.  It also includes instant messaging for Jabber clients and a couple options I didn’t recognize.  The Jabber support has a dedicated Google Talk option, but didn’t see AIM, Yahoo or Microsoft chat – which would be nice additions.   The browsing experience is nice and nicely skinned to match the rest of the experience.

Beyond Internet, Moblin includes the ability to play media files – something good for road trips for movies and tv shows (too bad its not iTunes) as well as music.  These features aren’t fully integrated, but you can see that the interface will be nice once completed.

There is also a “pinning” mechanism integrated throughout the OS.  Think favorites for the whole OS.  You can pin things that like – whether its a website, media file, etc. for easy retrieval later.  That is a pretty nice feature.

We tried to update the OS using the integrated update and it ran through the motions (although it didn’t update anything – the Live USB stick must be a read-only image).  That feature makes for a full featured and always patched experience.

This is still an early beta, but it shows a lot of promise.  Its something I hope to test again in a later form… it might even convince me to plunk down the dollars for a netbook in the future – just won’t be a Windows netbook… {big grin}