For those who care, here's my two-months-in impressions on my Samsung series 3 Chromebook.
Hardware:
The machine first off, is silent due to the SSD and ARM processor. When I first got it and realized it was fanless, has no vents anywhere, etc, I wa worried about overheating, which as it turns out isn't a problem at all. With normal web browsing, the device doesn't warm enough to even tell that it's on. When I have >8 tabs open, a slight warmth on the bottom, 10 degrees maybe, comes into play. When I have my "usual" work array of apps open (music player, file manager, 3-5 browsing tabs, and a tab with an online IDE, plus Pixlr in a side window), heat rises to mayb 12-15 degrees. Noticeable but not worrying. Streaming 1080p video in one tab brings the heat to about 20 degrees, but that seems to be the hottest it gets, even if i open half a dozen media windows at once. Battery life is around 4 hours with streaming Flash video at low screen brightness at night, 3 hours at high brightness. Just casual web browsing, at 50% brightness, you can get around 6-7 hours out of it. With Wifi disabled, running on the road, I can get >8 hours out of it.
It's built much sturdier than it looks. I am on the go a lot, and thus my potential for destruction of gadgets is high. The chromebook however, has an interesting design feature that (at least when closed) makes it at least reasonably tough. One thing you should know though is that the paint is cheap, the device looks like I swiped it with an ultrafine belt sander a few times. However, the device has survived an angry slap from another person to the hinge area without damage, two 6 foot drops while shut, and several 3-foot table drops. I've found that the solid-state internals are quite a bit more resilient than HDD's, etc, but the interesting hardware feature I mentioned is the chief cause for its' strength.
The device has multiple plastic plates, curved and smooth, butted up against each other to make up the casing. But unlike some other laptops, the chromebook's plating is "snapped" on extremely tight, giving the illusion that it's glued. But when dropped, instead of the casing cracking, the plates pop apart harmlessly, allowing you to pop them back together. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but it is quite nice either way.
A common objection to chromebook hardware is the screen. However, I find the screen to be very nice, especially for $250. It is matte first of all, and I love matte screens. The resolution is standard that you would see on a 14-15" notebook, but crammed into an 11.2" screen, making for a screen quality that looks better than a lot of more expensive laptops, until you start looking at IPS displays. It's bright enough to be used in direct sunlight while still being readable.
The device is ultrabook thin and incredibly light. So light that I have to rest my hands on it, to keep it from sliding off my lap in a car. Kudos to Samsung for that.
The keyboard is marvelous. I used this side-by-side with a Macboook Pro, and the keyboards were so similar as to feel identical. The keyboard is also big, extending close to edges of the machine to give maximum typing play. The touchpad is smooth and easy to use advanced gestures on, plus is rather large for a device this size. Since the device sees 7-12 hours of use every day, the keyboard and touchpad are crucial for me. The speakers are slightly disappointing, small and muffled, however I found they sound nice enough to watch movies on if I set the device on a table, counter, or lapdesk.
Software: The chromebook is fast. Very fast. It beats out a 2.3 Ghz HP laptop with 3 gb RAM, and a 2.13 Toshiba machine with 4 gb RAM in terms of page load time. It boots in less than 7 seconds, sometimes as fast as 5 (!!!) and shuts down in a similar amount of time. Applications open practically instantly, and the only time I hit lag is when I try to stream full HD video while having other flash-heavy pages open. I eliminated the lag by running the command "swap enable 4000" in the crosh window (the limited command line available when not in developer mode).
The OS is strange, but far less limited than people think. There's a web interface for AutoCAD should you need it (I don't). My web design tools I had to switch sadly, but Cpanel X has a powerful built in code editing suite, and Pixlr is ok if I want to create a few graphics. The key objection to Chrome OS is its' lack of offline functionality. Frankly I think that those objections are totally false, to the degree of being silly. The full GDocs suite is available offline, and I have a nice text editor that is powerful enough to recognize numerous code formats, etc and edit them. You can play music and video offline. You can view pictures offline, manage files, etc. There's a limited selection of casual games available offline as well. (Pandemic 2 is fun). So in general I think the OS isn't really limited as much as we've been told before; that's just an excuse to reject a new paradigm.
I put the device in developer mode, and installed Chrubuntu on the SSD, it ran fast, and I found I could get as much as 10 hours battery time out of it, which was fun. However I found the OS was not as snappy as Chrome, so I reset the device. My experimental side kicked in again and I booted Arch Linux with the XFCE environment on it for a brief period. Eventually I put the device back into verified boot mode, simply because I realized there wasn't anything crucial missing from Chrome OS. By the way Chrome OS supports Netflix now.
The 16GB of local storage seems dauntingly small, but I have found it suffices. I have my music collection of around 6 GB on here, plus around two hundred text documents, and data backups of a half dozen websites, and still have 2GB to spare. As long as you don't try to store a movie library, you're fine.
Conclusion:
Four and a half stars. The build quality is superb and tough enough to resist my unintentional murder attempts, and the device is super portable. The processor is snappy, especially with swap enabled. The keyboard and touchpad are outstanding. If the speakers and camera were better the device would be 5 stars.
At $250 this thing is a steal. If it were $450 I would probably still buy it.
My suggestions for the next generation Series 3:
Give it 4 GB of RAM.
Give it an optional 32 GB of SSD space.
Give it a better webcam.
Give it a better speaker set.
Why not update the processor to an Exynos 5 Quad?
With all those updates, Samsung could ask around $350-$400 and the device would still be an attractive buy. But this current device at the $250 price has blown my expectations out of the water. I highly recommend this device to anyone with the cash to spare.
Hardware:
The machine first off, is silent due to the SSD and ARM processor. When I first got it and realized it was fanless, has no vents anywhere, etc, I wa worried about overheating, which as it turns out isn't a problem at all. With normal web browsing, the device doesn't warm enough to even tell that it's on. When I have >8 tabs open, a slight warmth on the bottom, 10 degrees maybe, comes into play. When I have my "usual" work array of apps open (music player, file manager, 3-5 browsing tabs, and a tab with an online IDE, plus Pixlr in a side window), heat rises to mayb 12-15 degrees. Noticeable but not worrying. Streaming 1080p video in one tab brings the heat to about 20 degrees, but that seems to be the hottest it gets, even if i open half a dozen media windows at once. Battery life is around 4 hours with streaming Flash video at low screen brightness at night, 3 hours at high brightness. Just casual web browsing, at 50% brightness, you can get around 6-7 hours out of it. With Wifi disabled, running on the road, I can get >8 hours out of it.
It's built much sturdier than it looks. I am on the go a lot, and thus my potential for destruction of gadgets is high. The chromebook however, has an interesting design feature that (at least when closed) makes it at least reasonably tough. One thing you should know though is that the paint is cheap, the device looks like I swiped it with an ultrafine belt sander a few times. However, the device has survived an angry slap from another person to the hinge area without damage, two 6 foot drops while shut, and several 3-foot table drops. I've found that the solid-state internals are quite a bit more resilient than HDD's, etc, but the interesting hardware feature I mentioned is the chief cause for its' strength.
The device has multiple plastic plates, curved and smooth, butted up against each other to make up the casing. But unlike some other laptops, the chromebook's plating is "snapped" on extremely tight, giving the illusion that it's glued. But when dropped, instead of the casing cracking, the plates pop apart harmlessly, allowing you to pop them back together. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but it is quite nice either way.
A common objection to chromebook hardware is the screen. However, I find the screen to be very nice, especially for $250. It is matte first of all, and I love matte screens. The resolution is standard that you would see on a 14-15" notebook, but crammed into an 11.2" screen, making for a screen quality that looks better than a lot of more expensive laptops, until you start looking at IPS displays. It's bright enough to be used in direct sunlight while still being readable.
The device is ultrabook thin and incredibly light. So light that I have to rest my hands on it, to keep it from sliding off my lap in a car. Kudos to Samsung for that.
The keyboard is marvelous. I used this side-by-side with a Macboook Pro, and the keyboards were so similar as to feel identical. The keyboard is also big, extending close to edges of the machine to give maximum typing play. The touchpad is smooth and easy to use advanced gestures on, plus is rather large for a device this size. Since the device sees 7-12 hours of use every day, the keyboard and touchpad are crucial for me. The speakers are slightly disappointing, small and muffled, however I found they sound nice enough to watch movies on if I set the device on a table, counter, or lapdesk.
Software: The chromebook is fast. Very fast. It beats out a 2.3 Ghz HP laptop with 3 gb RAM, and a 2.13 Toshiba machine with 4 gb RAM in terms of page load time. It boots in less than 7 seconds, sometimes as fast as 5 (!!!) and shuts down in a similar amount of time. Applications open practically instantly, and the only time I hit lag is when I try to stream full HD video while having other flash-heavy pages open. I eliminated the lag by running the command "swap enable 4000" in the crosh window (the limited command line available when not in developer mode).
The OS is strange, but far less limited than people think. There's a web interface for AutoCAD should you need it (I don't). My web design tools I had to switch sadly, but Cpanel X has a powerful built in code editing suite, and Pixlr is ok if I want to create a few graphics. The key objection to Chrome OS is its' lack of offline functionality. Frankly I think that those objections are totally false, to the degree of being silly. The full GDocs suite is available offline, and I have a nice text editor that is powerful enough to recognize numerous code formats, etc and edit them. You can play music and video offline. You can view pictures offline, manage files, etc. There's a limited selection of casual games available offline as well. (Pandemic 2 is fun). So in general I think the OS isn't really limited as much as we've been told before; that's just an excuse to reject a new paradigm.
I put the device in developer mode, and installed Chrubuntu on the SSD, it ran fast, and I found I could get as much as 10 hours battery time out of it, which was fun. However I found the OS was not as snappy as Chrome, so I reset the device. My experimental side kicked in again and I booted Arch Linux with the XFCE environment on it for a brief period. Eventually I put the device back into verified boot mode, simply because I realized there wasn't anything crucial missing from Chrome OS. By the way Chrome OS supports Netflix now.
The 16GB of local storage seems dauntingly small, but I have found it suffices. I have my music collection of around 6 GB on here, plus around two hundred text documents, and data backups of a half dozen websites, and still have 2GB to spare. As long as you don't try to store a movie library, you're fine.
Conclusion:
Four and a half stars. The build quality is superb and tough enough to resist my unintentional murder attempts, and the device is super portable. The processor is snappy, especially with swap enabled. The keyboard and touchpad are outstanding. If the speakers and camera were better the device would be 5 stars.
At $250 this thing is a steal. If it were $450 I would probably still buy it.
My suggestions for the next generation Series 3:
Give it 4 GB of RAM.
Give it an optional 32 GB of SSD space.
Give it a better webcam.
Give it a better speaker set.
Why not update the processor to an Exynos 5 Quad?
With all those updates, Samsung could ask around $350-$400 and the device would still be an attractive buy. But this current device at the $250 price has blown my expectations out of the water. I highly recommend this device to anyone with the cash to spare.