The Cr-48 is the test notebook Google designed for the Pilot program. It’s the first of its kind.
It’s ready when you are, booting in about 10 seconds and resuming from sleep instantly. There’s built-in Wi-Fi and 3G, so you can stay connected everywhere, and a webcam for video chat. The vibrant 12-inch LCD display, full-size keyboard and oversized touchpad let you enjoy the web comfortably. And at just 3.8 pounds with over eight hours of active usage and a week of standby time, it’s easy to take along for the ride.
What did we leave out? Spinning disks, caps-lock key, function keys, and lap burns.
The keyboard also has a bunch of shortcuts that you would typically see on the Windows version of Chrome. These shortcuts include things like CTRL + H for your browser history, CTRL + W to close a tab and CTRL +/- for zoom in and out. If you want to see a full list of these commands, all you have to do is hit CTRL + ALT + ?. You won’t find any buttons on the touch pad. However, like a majority of netbooks on today’s market, the touch pad itself is, in fact, a button. Many people do not like clicky touch pads, especially if they like to scroll with one finger and click with another.
The Cr-48 has a 12.1-inch screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800. This, as many of you probably already know, is extremely rare on netbooks but is a more than welcome addition. It allows plenty of vertical screen space for easy viewing of web pages and the matte surface of the screen allows the Cr-48 to provide very strong viewing angles to the left and the right.
The one problem many people are reporting with the login is that the device does not recognize any login that is not followed by @gmail.com. Even if you use any number of accounts that are registered with Google, the Cr-48 will not recognize them. So, if you do not have a valid Gmail account, then you have hit a dead end in the login prompt because creating one during setup is impossible. If this happens, then you may need to log on to another computer that is not a Chrome-OS device and create a Gmail account ending in @gmail.com.
Google is definitely trying to shake things up in the netbook market with this device. A netbook designed completely around Chrome is a bold attempt, but if any company can do it, I’d put my money on Google. I mean, it is only a matter of time before they take over the world.
