I’ve been testing out a Chromebook at home for a while now. Friday was the first time I took it “on the road.” In other words outside my apartment.
Connecting to 3g
At times, 3G connectivity takes a bit longer to start up. (This probably happens at home too periodically; I just don’t watch startup there.) Waiting seems to solve it. Once I had to force it to reconnect by turning off the 3G and then turning it back on. I also had to click the X to close the message that 3G wasn’t available.
The keyboard
At home, I’ve been using an external keyboard and mouse when doing anything non-trivial. On the road, I realized I didn’t remember a keyboard shortcut: alt up/down is paging.
Overall experience
The Chomebook was easy to use. I was able to:
- Check email
- Check a website
- Open a word doc
- Post on coderanch
- Check the address of a restaurant.
On a cell phone you get a dropped call every so often. On the chromebook, this manifests as a few seconds loss of connectivity. This happened to be twice. On a google site, you get a nice message that “the application is unreachable.” On a non-google site, you get a long message about the dns entry not being available. While this is true, it seems like a scary message for the lay-person. The solution is to refresh the browser page in either case.
Bandwidth usage
I used the internet for about an hour total on Friday and went through only 4MB. Granted I didn’t do anything bandwidth heavy, but I still expected it to be higher.
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