Posted by The Blogging Desk on Thu, Jun 16, 2011
CBS Tech Talk:
Google's stripped-down laptop, the Samsung Chromebook Series 5, can be purchased from Best Buy and Amazon. Are you planning on buying it? With headlines suggesting that the Chromebook is "tepid" and "works great only if you're online," leaves many on the fence.
The device (which is priced from $430 to $500) - a bargain compared to MacBooks, which start at $999 - is built and optimized for the Web. It promises a faster, simpler way to surf in a more secure experience.
Dissed by New York Times personal technology columnist David Pogue: "Chromebooks assume that you are online anywhere you go. We are not quite there yet. When you're not online, the chromebook is a three-pound 'paperweight,'" he pointed out in yesterday's column entitled "A Laptop, Its Head in the Cloud."
The future sure is off to a bumpy start.
Google has released their first Chromebook into the wild and the reviews aren't so hot. At least, not for their first stab at things. I question the idea of charging upwards of $500 for a laptop that can only use one application - the browser. You can get much more capable "netbooks" at a lower cost. That's just silliness, Google. For a company to make most of its cash via ads, it's odd that they're fine with Samsung and others to charge so high a starting price for such hardware.
Google and Apple have taken very different stances on where they see the future of computing going. Apple thinks that native Cocoa apps are their vision, while Google is perfectly fine with web apps that include their ads inside of them.
Without being locked into Apple's iOS and Mac operating system, the majority of enterprise users could very well fit into Google's vision of computing, but things haven't started off in an ideal manner.
