A week with Chrome OS

Sasha Muller October 7, 2011

Image 1 of 5

Can a web-only Chromebook replace a Windows laptop for a week of work and play?

Laptops editor Sasha Muller set aside his usual machine and picked up a Chromebook to test how well it stands up to remote working, document sharing and – of course – Angry Birds.

Monday

For someone raised on Windows and acutely tuned to the sluggish boot times, cluttered desktops and the constant visual hum of pop-ups and notifications, my first moments with Google’s OS were notable for their disconcerting sense of calm.

That introduction to Chrome OS must have had a brain-dulling effect, as I hit my first snag during the brief touchpad tutorial. After mastering the art of the left-click, the two-fingered right-click and the two-fingered scroll, I found myself endlessly running through the drag-and-drop tutorial, impatiently waiting to be moved on to the next page.

It turns out you’re meant to stop once you have the hang of it; not drag the little Chrome icon to and fro like a dog chasing a stick.

My mild attack of idiocy aside, getting up and running is a gloriously slick experience.

Unlike the average Windows laptop, there’s no onslaught of nagging pop-ups, click-through wizards and endless updates

Unlike the average Windows laptop, there’s no onslaught of nagging pop-ups, click-through wizards and endless updates. As I use the Chrome browser on my normal work laptop, and allow it to sync personal data to my Google account, it took mere seconds for all my saved apps and bookmarks to automatically appear on the Chromebook.

Stored passwords seamlessly make their way across, too, and all the usual business-critical essentials – such as Facebook, TweetDeck and the BBC Wimbledon feed – were soon up and running. So far, so good.

It isn’t until someone takes Windows away that you realise quite how much of your time you spend in the browser. With multiple tabs open – Gmail, PC Pro’s website, our office webmail client and TweetDeck – I whiled away most of the working day sourcing review products and chipping away at a mountain of unread email.

With only two hours left of the working day, there was only one sensible course of action: to pay my first visit to the Chrome Web Store – the repository of its “so-called” apps – to ensure that Angry Birds HD was a faithful rendition of the bird-flinging gaming experience.

Come 6pm, further testing was required, so I packed up the Chromebook and cycled home to conduct a more comprehensive evaluation.

Tuesday

While webmail access to my work email proved adept enough for basic reading and replying, the lack of basic functions – any type of search facility, for one – soon started to grate.

So, my first real challenge was getting at the company’s Microsoft Exchange server. After a lengthy stare at Chrome’s Web Store, and some optimistic Googling around the subject, I came to one conclusion: there are zero in-browser email clients that can directly serve Microsoft Exchange accounts.

Not all hope was lost, however. After a quick email to our IT department, I managed to gain access via the company’s POP3 server, redirecting my email into a specific Gmail folder. Not ideal, and due to the lack of SSL encryption, certainly not secure, but just about workable (once I’d persuaded IT there was nothing more commercially sensitive in my inbox than an email to Darien reminding him about that fiver he owed me).
The next thrilling conundrum was how to get access to the magazine’s network storage. With all of PC Pro’s copy, photography and other useful bits and bobs located in a series of shared folders, it’s an integral part of our daily routine.

But with nothing more than a browser window at my disposal, there was only one solution: I had to resort to LogMeIn Free to connect to my Windows laptop. It felt like cheating, analogous to buying a Diet Coke and stirring in spoonfuls of sugar.

Wednesday

My third day with the Chromebook saw it accompany me to a product launch.

Things began badly. While tapping out notes in Google Docs, a dodgy Wi-Fi connection frequently left me staring at the “Trying to reach Google.com” message, while simultaneously preventing me from typing anything onscreen; mildly infuriating, to say the least.

When Google says that it has plans to add offline support to Google Docs, I can’t help wondering why it wasn’t included in the first place. Given the unreliability of wireless networks and mobile data connections, not having to rely on the internet 100% would come as a relief.

When Google says that it has plans to add offline support to Google Docs, I can’t help wondering why it wasn’t included in the first place

Still, it seemed the gods of good fortune were smiling on me. Just before mild panic set in, I noticed the presence of Quick Note, a basic notepad application that I’d previously installed on a whim, hiding among the bevy of installed Chrome applications.

Even without a Wi-Fi connection, Quick Note allowed me to keep typing – and thankfully, when I instinctively shut the laptop screen and carried it next door, it kept all my notes safe and sound, thus saving me from another rollicking back at HQ.

The next step was to post a quick blog of the event. Armed with an SD card filled with product close-ups, all I needed to do was quick crops and minor adjustments.

Slotting the SD card from my camera straight into the Chromebook allowed me to upload and edit my photos in the excellent Aviary Image Editor. Cropping images and adjusting levels was a slow, slightly juddery process, but it was bearable. The trouble came when trying to save the images and load them into our WordPress-based blog.

Neither of the image-editing apps I used – Aviary and the even more fully featured Pixlr – allowed me to save the images back to the SD card for uploading to the blog (Pixlr wouldn’t even open files from the SD card).

In my desperation I also tried Picnik, but that refused to even open the 4MB JPEG files, citing a “low on memory” error.

While it was possible to upload the images to Aviary’s Amazon S3-powered repository and link to the images stored in the cloud, we lost the ability to dynamically resize images; crucial to the fine-tuning of any blog post.

The final solution was less than elegant: I had to upload each image to Aviary, edit them one at a time, then download them back to the Chromebook’s local storage, known as the File Shelf.

While intermittent Wi-Fi connections are something a journalist is trained to do battle with regularly, this was enough to make me hanker for some crayons and a scanner.

Thursday

“Your device is currently offline.” My decision to work from home and rattle through a now mounting workload wasn’t off to a great start.

The wireless network was up and running, but I couldn’t access any websites, nor could I log into the router’s web interface. Employing the hallowed IT support meme of flicking the Chromebook on and off did nothing to help.
Rebooting the router didn’t resolve matters either, and reaching for the safety net of an Ethernet cable quickly brought about a horrible realisation: Chromebooks don’t have Ethernet sockets.

After half an hour spent resetting the router to factory defaults with a nearby netbook, and slowly setting everything back up, the internet gremlins finally left the building. The moral of the story? In the event of a malfunctioning router, make sure you have another Ethernet-equipped laptop to hand.

With people in the office now calling for my head, I resorted to VoIP to try to soothe angry editors. My first instinct was to install Skype; but of course there’s no Skype client. And with Facebook’s Skype-powered video chat requiring the installation of a client, that didn’t work either.

Still, Google has it covered. Its own chat service covers both text, voice and video, which all work seamlessly enough. I video-called my colleagues in the office and they immediately remarked on my shock of bed hair and rather casual attire. Teleworking tip: don’t wear pyjamas during video calls – it looks unprofessional.

Friday

Despite having spent almost a full week trapped in a browser, I was, by some small miracle, still well on course to complete the week’s workload. And although I initially thought I’d be lost without Microsoft Office and its slick feature set, I’d quite happily survived without.

This is thanks to excellent apps such as Zoho Writer. While Google Docs is great for online collaboration – it’s stunningly easy to work with colleagues to brainstorm feature ideas, layouts and review plans, for example – it doesn’t boast the most wonderful word processor in the world.

Zoho Writer, on the other hand, is noticeably more refined: it has a running word count, more than a slight visual hint of Microsoft Office, and the tabbed interface makes it easy to work on several documents at once.

It’s also testament to the quality of Samsung’s Series 5 Chromebook that I didn’t spend the afternoon looking lustfully at the keyboard of my regular Lenovo ThinkPad. It might feel a bit plasticky, but the spacious, responsive keyboard and reasonably sized 12.1in screen make it a surprisingly pleasant working companion. And, with no Windows 7 taskbar taking up precious pixels onscreen, the 1,280 x 800 resolution feels positively spacious.

It’s also testament to the quality of Samsung’s Series 5 Chromebook that I didn’t spend the afternoon looking lustfully at the keyboard of my regular Lenovo ThinkPad

In fact, my only mild disappointment was reserved for the lack of proper multi-monitor support. Once used to spreading work across multiple screens, it’s difficult to acclimatise to a single, modestly proportioned display.

And while I’d hoped that hooking up an external 1,920 x 1,200 monitor might help, the Chromebook’s display went blank for the duration, outputting solely on the 24in monitor alongside.

Worse still, there are no options to arrange windows side by side on the external display. You still have to toggle from tab to tab, with no way to have Zoho Writer occupy the left-hand of the screen, and a browser on the right, for example. When you’re trying to keep a crafty eye on the Wimbledon scores while pretending to write a feature, this is a major shortcoming.

Saturday

A blissfully lazy day around the house allowed the Chromebook to breathe easy on the productivity front: all that I required was a constant supply of music and light entertainment, punctuated by the occasional video of people falling over. Surely, this wouldn’t be too much to ask.
Immediately, I hit a major snag. With Google’s Music beta currently only available to US-based users, and gigabytes of music stored on a NAS drive attached to my wireless network, I couldn’t easily access my music collection.

The first solution that sprung to mind didn’t exactly embrace the Chromebook’s cloud-based computing vision: copying the files onto a flash drive and jamming it into a spare USB port definitely felt like cheating.

In fact, the easiest method I found was to log in to the front end of my Synology NAS Audio Station and play files directly in the browser, with its neat little media player.

Not ideal, and not a solution that will work for other brands of NAS device, but it did at least allow me to sit in the garden and zone out on a deckchair. Needless to say, Google’s Music beta can’t come soon enough.

Even standard-definition video proved close to the Chromebook’s limits

After a morning spent lazily flicking through the more rarely played MP3s in my collection (you can’t beat a blast of Mel & Kim), it was time to see how the Chromebook’s modest Intel Atom processor would cope with streaming video.

It was disappointing to find that high-definition streams from YouTube, Vimeo and BBC iPlayer were completely unwatchable; given the minimal overhead of the stripped down, super-lightweight Chrome OS, we’d vainly hoped that Google might have squeezed a little more power from Intel’s weakling processor.

Even standard-definition video proved close to the Chromebook’s limits. BBC’s Wimbledon stream was plagued by hiccups: the free-flowing rallies and guttural screams of the women’s tennis interrupted by sudden jerks and tears in the video feed.

Switching to Freecaster.tv’s live stream of the Mountain Bike Downhill World Cup was equally underwhelming, and I had to ease the video quality to its lowest setting to get a less jerky, watchable frame rate. Google clearly has a lot of optimisation to do before the Chromebook can handle internet video with any conviction.

Sunday

Apart from a strong urge to find the ingredients for a traditional roast, I awoke with one forceful desire: to waste the day playing games. With a gaming PC lying in pieces after an attempted upgrade, and a Nintendo GameCube lost in the attic, Chrome’s Web Store was my only hope for a quick gaming fix.

The dullest game of the day turned out to be actually finding anything worth playing in the first place. While there are recognisable titles – Angry Birds, for example, and plenty of clones of Arcade classics such as Atari’s Pac-Man and Missile Command – the quality on offer is immensely variable.

And like many of the so-called Apps in Google’s Web Store, many games do nothing more than redirect a browser tab to an external website.

Widen your search to the far-flung corners of the internet, however, and there are myriad excellent Flash games at your fingertips.

With everything from beautifully crafted adventure games, such as the excellent Dream Machine, to the glorious high-speed martial arts platformer, The House of Dead Ninjas, a little patience rewards with plenty of free-to-play gaming options.

The burning issue isn’t the amount of games on offer, though, but rather the lacklustre Flash performance. Even basic games such as the classic Desktop Tower Defense Pro soon splutter and jerk as the action hots up, and it didn’t take more than an hour of Angry Birds HD before the more complex levels started to reduce frame rates to a crawl.
Set side by side with a netbook with a similarly powered Atom processor running Windows 7, the Chromebook seemed to find even basic Flash applications a struggle. Indeed, where the dual-core Atom processors only baulk at the most demanding Flash titles with Windows 7 at the helm, Chrome OS seems to have serious performance issues.

It’s almost like it was built by Apple, not Google.

The verdict

While my time with the Chromebook was punctuated with fits of internalised apoplectic rage, and not an insignificant smattering of mild aggravation, the end of my week with Chrome OS saw that negativity tempered with real optimism.

There genuinely was something liberating about the experience. Life in a browser isn’t as limiting as you may first imagine: for those moments when I wasn’t butting my head against Chrome OS’s quirks, I really rather enjoyed the simplicity of it all. And even when I was frustrated by the experience, the glimmer of something brilliant behind it all constantly urged me to persevere.

That brilliance was perfectly exemplified when I revisited the Chromebook only a week later. Chrome OS had quietly updated itself and all but fixed the poor Flash performance.

Watching iPlayer’s HD stream of The Apprentice proved that Google had worked wonders. While not judder-free, it was perfectly watchable, and YouTube 720p HD videos had become silky smooth. Games improved, too, and by a significant margin. The little Chromebook had been utterly transformed.

iPlayer

Offline support, however, remained stubbornly absent. And, try as I might, I still can’t imagine anyone putting up with an expensive netbook that downs tools every time the internet connection goes walkabout. It’s enough to test the patience of the Pope, let alone the average consumer in PC World.

Take some time to really get to grips with it, though, and there’s no doubt that, Google willing, the Chrome OS experience has immense potential.

It was telling that I never once targeted the hardware with expletive-laden tirades; it was the software that frustrated. And, as Google proved, regular updates can make all the difference.

Indeed, if anyone can make this concept stick, Google can. If it brings its cloud-based Music service to the UK, and delivers offline support that lets me use those 16GB of local storage, I’d reserve a warm place in my laptop bag for a Chromebook, and I think many others might, too.