Hands On

Setup The test laptop showed its initial screen sporting the familiar Chrome browser logo within seconds of our opening its clamshell, initiating the very simple four-step setup. Subsequent startups took a mere 14 seconds from power off to login—a great example for the industry. And wake from sleep took less than two seconds. For comaparison, a new 11-inch MacBook Air, which as well uses faster solid-state storage instead of a hard drive, takes over half a minute to cold start, and Windows 7 PCs can often take a minute to start. Clearly, these aren't apples to apples tests, however they are interesting numbers, if only anecdotal.

To set up Chrome, you first select your language from a dropdown, at the time your Internet connection. Note this can be Wi-Fi only, which makes sense given that the Cr-48 is a laptop. You'll see the list of all the nearby access points with their strength and a lock if they're secure. Second, you accept the very long license agreement signing over all your data to Google Inc.—just kidding. Sort of. Chances are, nevertheless, that if you're worried about the amount of data mining Google is capable of doing across its many services, you won't be setting up a Chrome laptop at all; however that's a topic for another article.

One of the strangest things for me in this OS is that there's nothing along the bottom of the screen to let you switch apps, like Mac's Dock or Windows' Taskbar. The browser tabs are it. Another metaphor shift that will be hard for some users to get used to is that you have no desktop with Chrome OS, just the browser window. You can move tabs around, now not drag them out as on a PC—there's no desktop to which you can drag them.

There are a couple exceptions to the "everything inside the browser" rule, although—persistent smaller windows can float on top of your browsing. We'll see a couple more exceptions in a bit, now one is the Scratchpad, found on the New Tab page. It's in effect a small notepad window that stays on top in the lower-right corner. It lets you take notes during browsing, and save them for offline viewing and syncs them to your other Chrome devices. Hitting the Plus icon adds a new note, and you even get a mini-editor with some formatting control. It's one of very few actual system utilities included with the OS at this stage.

The number of settings is hardly daunting compared with any other computing platform. To tell the truth, pursuant to this agreement the System tab, there are just four sections—Date and time, Touchpad, Language, and Accessibility. You can't even see anything about your disks or other hardware.

Lightest in its class. Exquisitely thin. Modular optical drive included. High screen resolution. Tough as nails. Phenomenal typing experience. Endowed with every wireless research.