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broken gear chromebook Engineer google

This Chromebook is Dead

Deceased, kaput, no longer of this world – dead Chromebook motherboard

It is with a tinge of no real sadness that I present to you an image of a dead Chromebook motherboard. The Samsung Chromebook too is dead, on account of the non functioning motherboard.

It wasn’t a huge loss because these things are so cheap they are almost disposable. And disposing of it I am indeed doing. The dismembering of the Chromebook, I hesitate to call it a computer because that makes me think Microsoft, has been done for two reasons.

Firstly out of simple curiosity to see what it looks like inside. Secondly although I didn’t keep much data on the 16GB solid state drive there would have been some files of I know not what provenance and so it seemed to make sense to permanently delete this memory. Just what you would have done in the old hard drive days but slightly different.

As you can see the ssd now has a nail in it, driven firmly in by my handy Leatherman Multi-tool. No one should be without one.

The dead Chromebook motherboard itself is worth dwelling on. It’s diminutive nature represents beauty and the plastic shell in which it was mounted, consisting mostly of screen, keyboard and a couple of speakers, evidence of how cheap these things really are to churn out.

It is the future. Low cost, disposable computing resource and User Interface.

I include an earlier photo of the dead Chromebook motherboard for comparison together with

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Business business applications chromebook Cloud google mobile apps obsolescence storage backup & dr

Office365 – How Low Can You Go ?

It seems to me that a tipping point has arrived for businesses large and small, many of which after having drastically cut back on their IT spend over the last few years now find themselves coasting into 2014 on the fumes and vapours of Windows XP and Office 2003/7.

Andrew Beardsmore is a new contributor to trefor.net and this is his first post. He’s been obsessed by tech for two decades and has spent most of that time fixing everything from networks to netbooks. Now he’s sharing the knowledge, and the obsession.

I recently had a bit of a tweetup with @EvanKirstel regarding Microsoft’s amazing deal with Office365 (check it out at: https://twitter.com/andyosira/status/481463379383820288).

It seems to me that a tipping point has arrived for businesses large and small, many of which after having drastically cut back on their IT spend over the last few years now find themselves coasting into 2014 on the fumes and vapours of Windows XP and Office 2003/7.

Cloudy

Home users who extravagantly trotted off to Currys/PCWorld during their “hey, we’re going bust” sales and splurged on full versions of more recent MS Office software (though intending to only blow a few hundred quid on a chunky Windows 8 laptop) probably won’t have heard yet of Office365. They also may not have noticed those early ChromeBooks, or if they did they weren’t entirely convinced by the PCWorld sales folk when faced with what looked like Ubuntu. That is, Ubuntu without a hard drive…or apps.* Their new high capacity laptop hard drives, overflowing with growing photo libraries from flashy megamegapixel point-&-shoots, are already laughing at their puny free two gigabyte Dropbox accounts, and buying yet another discounted external USB hard drive ‘My Brick’ to backup and fill with all their pics and videos of school plays and homework projects, as well as every family member’s iPad/iPod/iPhone backup…well, it just seems so ‘2011’, doesn’t it?

Now these home users are included in this mini-cloud revolution also. (Not every household bought a NAS — though perhaps they should have — as they ARE expensive. Expensive, anyway, when compared to the wares peddled by Microsoft.)

In my opinion, the principles are broadly similar whether you are purchasing enterprise licensing or you are a home user “with a lot of stuff”.

  • Both need humongous space and/or backup and want a whizzy new version of Office.
  • Both want to be able to access it all whilst mobile (even if your mobile data provider hasn’t heard of your holiday home’s postcode, and thus offline editing is also needed).
  • Both want to share and collaborate.

With monthly offers that include an Office365 subscription (spanning multiple devices and user accounts) AND one terabyte of online storage now available for less than the cost of three lattes, just how cheap does it all need to be? And would you trust it if it got any cheaper ?

How does $7 a month sound? (In dollars because — Yup — stateside rollout first.) For this amount you can put Office365 on your PC and get a terabyte of storage thrown in. Make it $10 and you can install on five PCs and have as many as five user accounts (each with its own terabyte of online storage). A terabyte? That’s one thousand gigabytes for those of us with suntans and more interest in Wimbledon than “The IT Crowd” reruns.

Interestingly, Microsoft commissioned a recent survey and decided that about three quarters of us only have about thirteen gigabytes of ‘stuff’, so one thousand gigabytes should pretty much cover it. To be honest, though, this number sounds like it’s been picked more to justify their updated freemium offering of a fifteen gigabyte deal.

Many will forget about their Dropbox accounts, mothball their GoogleDrive accounts, lose the power supply plugs and mini USB cables for their ‘My Bricks’ (and never again dream of owning a NAS). They’ll take the plunge into subscriptions-based software purchasing** just for the great one terabyte ‘giveaway’ alone. Got a smartphone that you take pics on? How about letting it backup all those precious shots automatically to OneDrive (smile!).

Think about it. Never again will you need to go through a ‘fork-lift’ upgrade process between versions of Office — remember the advent of the blasted ribbon in Office 2007? — as your device will instead accept the more frequent but gradual improvements and changes in the same way your smartphone updates its apps whilst you sleep. It will backup and sync continuously, silently, all the time. If you’re a small to medium business, what this means is that the guy who takes the backup tapes home every night and puts a new one in every morning won’t have to continue to lie each time he forgets. Or you can rethink your price plan with MozyPro, or whoever. The AD-like control you get over the data it handles will sufficiently please both your sysadmin and your CIO/CISO.

Many will consider Microsoft’s new 1TB + Office365 $7 per month subscription a no-brainer. And, if you’re bulk buying for business, the deal gets even better, as according to the third link I offer below it is just $2.50 (yearly commitment). Such a huge saving is certain to ensure your continuing position with the company, that is if you can persuade your CFO. And if against all odds it turns out to be a rubbish idea and they fire you, well, they can just cancel your user subscription!

N.B. I wonder how many smaller partnerships and LLPs will be tempted to take the home licensing route on their mixed-usage mobile devices…pay the $10 five-user rate, out of guilt, and call it BYOD when it’s in the office?!

*Company-wide Chromebook deployment: Great way to to upgrade to a modern OS, get a new office productivity suite, AND equip your workforce with mobile devices for less than the price of a desktop refresh. I want to know more about the experiences of companies who have ‘gone Google’ in this manner. I like what I have seen so far with Google Appcare. However, having recently dropped their cloud offering’s pricing, I wonder how they feel about Microsoft’s new deal? To quote mine host, it’s “certainly warming up in the cloud wars”).

**Just quietly say ouch and forget it’s happening.

Chase the following links for specific details and price plans for Office365 and OneDrive:

https://blog.onedrive.com/new-onedrive-storage-plans/

http://time.com/25107/chart-cloud-storage-services-compared/

https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/plans/

Thanks for reading. You can find more on the subject of Office365 and similar tech at twitter.com/@andyosira.

Categories
chromebook End User H/W

Just picked up my Acer C720 WiFi Chromebook Granite Gray

image

Picked up my Acer C720 WiFi Chromebook. Granite Gray not Ash as foretold in this previous post but hey. Might never know what colour ash was 🙂 Also it’s a shame that international language seems to have dumbed down to the lowest common denominator of Americun English. Ah well.

Back at the office I thought I’d bang out some words of wisdom for you before user testing the product. I bought the Chromebook from PC World Business. One does this ostensibly when one requires a VAT receipt from PC World, dont ya know.

Whilst hanging around waiting for the PC World Business system to boot up I got into conversation and casually asked whether there were any discount codes available. The “sales advisor” (I imagine that’s how it’s speld) tapped his keyboard and hey presto a £20 discount appeared.

So my Acer C720 WiFi Chromebook Granite Gray was not £199.99. It was £149.99 plus VAT which I’m sure your quick thinking minds will have totted up to £179.99 give or take a bit of rounding. Result eh? 🙂

I took a look at other Chromebooks on sale whilst hanging around. They were pretty much identical to the Acer. Small differences in build quality perhaps but these are all commodity items. It’s like buying bags of cement, or tins of baked beans.

Now what is interesting is I happen to know the discounts are not available from PC World’s Retail arm. This is because PC World Retail buys its stuff from Dixons Retail who in turn get it from a UK Distributor who buys his from the European Disti who gets it from the manufacturer. I also happen to know (it’s spring – a little bird told me) the manufacturer’s price is £90 so there is plenty of margin in there if you can buy direct from the manufacturer but sod all if you have to slice it 4 ways.

Apparently most of the Samsung products bring good margins – it’s only Apple who are greedy. What do I care? I got an Acer C720 Chromebook for £179.99.

More on this as it happens.

Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Just bought an Acer Chromebook Ash – review to follow.
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles

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Apps chromebook End User

Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?

chromebookThe Samsung Chromebook was the subject of a number of blog posts in the latter part of 2013. The conclusion was generally good though not perfect with a specific mention of the touchpad locking up quite annoyingly on occasion.

Well in the last few weeks the good ole Samsung Chromebook has been hanging on me to the point where I almost considered it unusable. I figured this was just an extension of the touchpad problem. Don’t think it is. Googling comes up with lots of other people with the same problem with all sorts of suggested solutions that didn’t seem to do it. This included switching to the beta version of Chrome OS. Not sustainable.

One clue came with the suggestion of logging in as a guest to see if the same problem exists. This provides a “clean” instance of Chrome without any extensions you might have installed yourself. Maybe it was an extension problem. I figured I’d bypass the guest login stage and just see if there were any obvious rogue extensions, bearing in mind I’ve not had the Chromebook that long and am wary of sticking in extensions in any case.

Microsoft’s Ctrl Alt Delete doesn’t work for Task Manager on the Chromebook. It’s simpler than that  – shift esc. There was nothing immediately obvious. Then I looked at the list of extensions. I had Google Cast, Tweetdeck, Alexa Traffic Rank, Proxlet Tweet Filter (uh? must go with Tweetdeck?), Tweetdeck Launcher and rollApp File Opener. I installed the latter when I was having problems opening a Powerpoint file. I don’t recall it making any difference and have not used it since.

I zapped rollApp. The problem appears to have gone away. Sorted. There you go. All your Chromebook IT issues sorted. Anytime. Just let me know.

Just to finish off I had intended to write a post on how easy it is to print from the Chromebook. Supposedly you have to use the Google Cloud Print Service. I don’t recall setting this up. I just press print and the Chromebook sees my home printer and off it goes. None of this loading driver stuff one has to do with other operating systems. Simples.

Categories
End User gadgets virtualisation

Update on Chromecast story – chrome literally being cast

Chromecast is now working for my browser. Yesterday I mentioned that I’d found the icon for using Chromecast from my chrome browser but hadn’t had time to test it. I’m working from home today so I’m sat in the TV room having a play testing.chromecast in browser

The pic shows my Google screen on both the Chromebook and the TV – it’s a Doctor Who special Google doodle if you’re interested.

Interesting thing is that I can be in one window on the Chromebook whilst another window shows on the TV.

Also interesting is the fact that the cursor that appears on the Chromebook doesn’t appear on the TV and there is understandably a lag between when I type and when it appears on the box. This isn’t a big deal. It’s just interesting (I think I may have mentioned).

The whole experiment with the Google environment does point towards the need for good quality high speed connectivity to make it all work. The photo in this post was taken with the Samsung Galaxy S4 and uploaded to Drive. I used online photo editing service pixlr.com to edit the photo fetched from Drive, subsequently saved to a specific blog images file back in Drive and then uploded to WordPress on my server at Timico (running VMware instance fwiw).

There was a little delay with each process step but not too bad – certainly bearable.

Ciao.

Categories
chromebook End User phones

Footnote to Samsung Chromebook free Galaxy phone offer

samsung chromebookYou may have read my Samsung Chromebook special offer not very customer friendly post. Well the free phone arrived yesterday. It was a Samsung Galaxy Mini. I’ve not seen it other than a quick glimpse as I got in from London at around 9pm. I bought the Samsung Chromebook on 30th September and the phone arrived on 14th November – six weeks later.

My 13year old lad took me by surprise by calling me whilst I was on the tube. Must have been an overground bit. The tone of the sporadic conversation was “is that phone for me?”. “Yes”.

When I got in I immediately received an IT support request which I promptly bounced back. I’m not going to touch the Galaxy Mini. Should all be self evident. I might see if I can persuade the lad to write a few words describing his experience once he has had time to play with it. Ve shall see…

PS anyone got the HP11 Chromebook – I’m sure we’d all like to hear more about the USB power supply overheating problem.

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Business chromebook Cloud phones

Samsung Chromebook special offer not very customer friendly

Samsung chromebook offerI bought my Samsung Chromebook via Tesco.com. What particularly attracted me to the deal was the offer of a free Samsung Galaxy phone. The model of phone wasn’t specified so my expectations weren’t high.  The Chromebook was only £229 so it wasn’t going to be a high end phone but I figured it would be ok for one of the kids.

The Chromebook itself came very quickly – Anne collected it from our nearest store (400 yards from our house!). The phone however didn’t materialise. Hmm. The Tesco portal told me that the order was only part fulfilled so I assumed the phone would follow. It didn’t.

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Apps chromebook End User gadgets

How to do a print screen using Chromebook

error message using east cost wifiThis is dual post really because I was going to write briefly about an error message that came up when using eastcoast.co.uk’s wifi. I couldn’t access Google drive because open DNS is blocking it! Rather than stick the text of the message in I thought I’d just do a screenshot but there was no obvious way of doing it.

A simple Google search came up with the goods and it is quite impressive. You do a ctr shift  []]] (the key above the number 6 – took me a while to find it) and the cursor changes to a + select tool. You can chose which bit of the screen to print – uber impressivo.

This might be old new s to some of you but as you know it sometimes takes me a while to catch up 🙂

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4g Business Cloud mobile connectivity

4G remains impressive

Using up the last of the battery on this Chromebook from my garret at a Travelodge in London. I’m hanging off the Huaweii MiFi with a 4G sim. I’m sure I’ve said it before but I have to say it again the experience is terrific. Seriously useful for business. Pages load up almost instantly. It’s as if I was using my home WiFi and my FTTC line. Fair play:)

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chromebook End User

Life without a laptop – Samsung Chromebook charger left at home

Samsung chromebooks have no future unless they change to USB micro charger.
I’m on the train to London.  I’ve left my Samsung Chromebook at home and only have 2 hours of battery left. I ran it all morning on the battery thinking I’d plug it in on the train.
It isn’t the end of the world.
I’m using my Samsung galaxy s4 to write this post. However I will say that Samsung’s days as a chromebook manufacturer are numbered unless they change charger connectors. Theirs is a tiny proprietary job.
The new HP chromebook has a microUSB connector for charging. I always carry at least one micro USB cable.
Nuff said.

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chromebook Cloud End User

Chromebook just crashed

samsung chromebookMy Samsung Chromebook just crashed. Just like that. Fortunately the recovery process was like lightning – even restored the browser tabs. Most of the time taken to recover was downloading the web pages. How many times have we all gulped when realising that we are about to have to reboot the old Microsoft PC. It would have been time to stick the kettle on.

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4g Business chromebook mobile connectivity

54 minutes 315 Megabytes 4G conference call using Google+ Hangout

sweyn hunterGoogle Hangout for 54 minutes using Samsung Chromebook and EE4G Huaweii MiFi clocks up 315Megabytes.

Just had a very pleasant 54 minutes video call with Sweyn Hunter using Google+ Hangout. My Huaweii 4G MiFi (courtesy of EE) tells me that it used approximately 315MB of bandwidth – probably slightly less as I did some emails before hand.

At Sweyn’s end he had “good old fashioned BT ADSL” with maybe 512k uplink speed. He lives in Orkney. The video quality was great though it did freeze two or three times in the 54 minutes. The only slight issue was an element of half duplex/one way speech in that if he was speaking and I tried to speak at the same time. I quickly got used to that and it didn’t detract  from the quality of the conversation.

Also 54 minutes was a long hangout for what was just a casual chat – I’ve never met Sweyn but converse with him from time to time on Twitter – @sweynh – I’m sure he won’t mind me telling everyone. The point being that if we were comfortable having a 54 minute video conversation the quality must have been good – otherwise we would have cut it short.

Sweyn is an interesting bloke I’m sure he won’t mind me saying – you should follow him. He is organising an Island Govcamp in Orkney next year on 6th and 7th September.

Might try a hangout using O2 and Vodafone sims in my various phones next time. It will be interesting to see if personal video calling is going to at last get mainstream with 4G. Bandwidth cost is still going to be an issue. You can work out for yourselves how quickly you will eat up your own data bundle.

Categories
Business chromebook Cloud

Samsung Chromebook test #3 – writing presentations

samsung chromebookIs the Samsung Chromebook any good for creating presentations? I’m about to find out. I have one to finish and am now off out to London for a couple of days – IPExpo and a dinner in Westminster ce soir. I also have to finish a presentation I’m doing next week on behalf of NewNet so it needs to be done whilst travelling.

I have my old Dell laptop out but the weight difference between it and the Chromebook is making it a no brainer. The Dell stays at home. I guess it is possible to buy thin, light laptops but not at £229.

I’ve moved the original presentation, started using Microsoft, onto my Drive. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Categories
End User mobile apps storage backup & dr

Photo backup to #NAS box solved #SweetHome Android

Photo backup to ReadyNas problem solved.

You may have been following my attempts to back up my photos from my Samsung Galaxy S4 Android to my NAS box. This has become an issue since starting to play with the Samsung Chromebook which doesn’t recognise the phone when it’s plugged in via USB.

I tried a few methods including downloading from the Dropbox folder to the Chromebook and then dragging the folder into the relevant share on the NAS. This is very inelegant and you end up with a zipped file.

The answer was an app. I tried a number of them including Netgear’s own ReadyNAS Remote which doesn’t generally get good reviews. I got ReadyNAS Remote one to work but found that I could only upload single files manually which wasn’t going to be good enough. No response from the ReadyNAS forum on that one either. I also tried Airdroid with no success.

I got excited with “Upload 2 NAS Lite” last night when it appeared to be successfully uploading the files. However it was very slow and I left it running overnight. This morning the app told me it had finished but there were no files to be found on the NAS box. Looking at the forum for this app I can see others having the same problem with no apparent resolution. Using Upload 2 NAS Lite looked as if it was going to be a complicated job so I looked elsewhere.

Lying in bed this morning I then came across “Sweet Home“. This one worked like a dream and did the job far more quickly than Upload 2 NAS Lite. The User Interface was also by far the easiest to use. I am a happy chap. I am actually going to buy the pro version it is that good. Very easy to use.

The only thing left to nail is the fact that I usually backup to both the ReadyNAS and a separate 2TB palm drive that I keep in my desk. I’ll have to see if the Chromebook can see that drive and then look at backing up from the NAS box. The alternative is to have two separate NAS boxes which is somewhat industrial strength and over the top for my personal needs or to run with only using Google+ and the NAS.

Ve shall see…

Categories
chromebook Cloud End User

Chromebook on the move

No science here but I’m using the Samsung Chromebook hanging off the Huaweii MiFi with an EE SIM whilst on the train to Laandan. The Chromebook didn’t like the on-board WiFi so I’m not using that but the MiFi works well so no probs.

Although I’m accessing WordPress on what is essentially my private cloud it isn’t particularly sensitive to the bandwidth available so I can’t say I’ve noticed whether it is affected by the speed of internet access provided by the cellular connection. If I was using YouTube I suspect that would be a different experience, unless in a 4G coverage area.

As I continue to use the Chromebook it does occur to me that it is strange that every screen I look at is a browser window. Other than that it is very much business as usual. Expecting to be able to give you an update on the photo uploading tomorrow. Meetings in town today.

Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Just bought an Acer Chromebook Ash – review to follow.
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles

Categories
Apps chromebook End User

Samsung Chromebook keeps losing WiFi connection but reboot is very fast

samsung chromebookThe Samsung Chromebook has lost its WiFi connection twice now and I’ve been unable to reconnect it without rebooting. I guess I could have added another connection instead of rebooting but the process of rebooting is very fast.

If I had to do that with the Microsoft laptop I could have gone away and made a cup of tea during the reboot.

I think the device is 95% of the way there. Still need to nail the photo transfer issue. The other test is going to be mobility. I’m travelling to London on Monday and will see how I get on with it on the go. The issue won’t be portability etc because the Chromebook is delightfully light. It’s how the connectivity goes plus in tandem with that how well it works offline which I haven’t really looked at yet.

Ciao…

Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Just bought an Acer Chromebook Ash – review to follow.
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles

Categories
Apps broadband chromebook End User mobile apps

Photo xfer from Samsung Galaxy S4 to NAS backup via Chromebook

Backup to NAS better than cloud when using slow broadband.

Photos get backed up from my Samsung Galaxy S4 to Google+ and via my Microsoft powered laptop to a separate local NAS box. This doesn’t work for the Samsung Chromebook as the laptop doesn’t recognise the presence of the phone when I plug it in. Also in any one month the photo storage requirement can easily exceed the storage available on the Chromebook – it’s a machine for the cloud.

As it happens when I got my S4 I also got 50GB of Dropbox space free for two years and the photos from the phone have been happily backing up to Dropbox. Why not if it is free? Of course this means that the internet bandwidth I use for backing up the pics has effectively doubled (ish – Google+ doesn’t upload the full size I don’t think).

Last night I downloaded September’s photos from Dropbox to my Chromebook. Dropbox zips the files so it isn’t ideal but it did mean that they were available on the Chromebook for me to drag into the upload box of the NAS box (Netgear ReadyNAS 2TB). Looks as if it has worked though the zipped file on the NAS is only 640MB compared with 1.6GB on Drive so will have to check the contents are all there. I don’t really want to zip the pics anyway. I want them easily accessible. I have plenty of storage space.

This is a bit of a long winded way of backing up locally. There has to be a simpler way of doing it. Also like I said before it also assumes you have enough free storage space on the Chromebook.

The one thing I’ve noticed during this phase of tyre kicking is that you really know when you’re connection is offline, even if it is only for a few seconds. Either my WiFi is not rock solid, which is believable or the FTTC connection is not rock solid, which is also believable.  I don’t think I’ll be totally happy until I get FTTP.

I just had to reboot the Chromebook because it totally lost the WiFi hookup and there appeared to be no way of reconnecting it via the settings page.

Categories
chromebook Cloud End User

Samsung Chromebook

Just ordered a Samsung XE303 Chromebook from Tesco. £229 inc VAT. At Timico we run a Microsoft environment so this will just have to be the platform for my Google account which is fair enough.

A few things have struck me during the process of making the buying decision. My work laptop died this morning, or at least the hard drive did. Most of my stuff is backed up so that isn’t a major worry. Had I been using a Chromebook all along, aside from the cost of the online storage,  I wouldn’t have even had to give the backup issue a second thought.

The second thing that struck me is anti virus. We have 6 laptops in our house, all protected by a variety of anti virus solutions.  Keeping track of what is up to date and what isn’t is a bit of an effort. If the family were all using Chromebooks then that problem would go away.

Only problem is that whilst the Chromebook would be fine for most things there are some games and programmes used by the kids that are currently only available for Apple and Microsoft platforms. This will change in time.

One bemusing thing about buying the Chromebook from Tesco was that when I’d finished the website suggested that I might be interested in buying Microsoft Office or Office 365. Suspect the Tesco product managers don’t really know what a Chromebook is.

PS I bought the WiFi only one. I think the day of an additional SIM for your laptop are numbered.

Categories
chromebook Cloud End User

ChromeOS – quick play

I realise that this is of little interest to most of you but I’m having a play with ChromeOS. I have it running on a virtual machine on my Dell laptop. It’s a bit slow but that is going to be because of the VM rather than the OS itself and certainly not due to the lack of bandwidth. Also every now and again it crashes, notionally due to lack of memory.

Initial impressions are good though it’s not perfect. For example in order to try out the online music app it asks you for your credit card info even though the app is free. Apple does this which I hate. I have subsequently found that you can bypass the Apple credit card capture page by not filling any of the fields and clicking “next”. Google won’t let you get away with this which I don’t like.

I have to fill out this form in order for Google to tell me whether the music streaming is “available in my country”. A simple “googling” tells me it is only available in the good ole US of A so it is a bit of a waste of my time and certainly irritating that a global organisation such as Google would have a product that was restricted to that country.

Next I tried the image editor and was a little disappointed to see it had pretty limited editing tools – crop, autofix, contrast and brightness. I need to be able to resize for the web as well as crop. Still it was easy to find a photo to edit. I just stuck one in Google Drive and hey presto it was there online. I use IRFanview on the laptop which doesn’t seem to be available for ChromeOS.  There do seem to be lots of photo editing apps in the chrome Web Store though so that is probably ok.

I have a good feeling about ChromeOS. At £229 a Chromebook is not expensive to try out though I do have an issue with having too many gadgets at any one time. I want to play with ChromeOS, Windows8 and Windows8 running on a Nokia Lumia 920 over 4G. It isn’t manageable though to have so many gadgets, especially as you have to sign up for a 24 month 4G contract with EE to lay your hands on the Lumia. My friend Kory raves about the Samsung Chromebook though doesn’t recommend it as a primary system yet.

The general Google ecosystem really is heading in the right direction. I’m building up to a bit of a post about the Google versus Microsoft battle for the desktop with a specific slant on Unified Communications. It will have to wait for another day though. It needs more time.

So long…