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I've been using the Samsung Chromebook Plus (ARM chip) laptop/tablet hybrid the past 4 months and it's one of the best devices I've ever owned. Very cheap and h

I've been using the Samsung Chromebook Plus (ARM chip) laptop/tablet hybrid the past 4 months and it's one of the best devices I've ever owned. Very cheap and has high build quality (great screen and aluminium body). The 4 years prior I used the first ARM Samsung Series 3 Chromebook (much lower build quality, but it was great before it died). I currently use tablet mode for 2-3 hour session for portrait reading (Wikipedia Android app, long-form articles) and from time-to-time light note-taking (Squid Android app) and PDFs. Haven't used crouton or done dev work on this Chromebook yet. Here's a quick review of modern touch-screen Chromebooks used as tablets. While the hardware is exceptional, the software is terrible in tablet-mode. Here are the painful issues that I can currently remember: 1. Easy to accidentally close the entire browser by brushing the X button (I was thinking the browser was crashing the first 4-5 times it happened, very frustrating as can't CTRL-SHIFT-T in tablet mode) 2. Easy to accidentally close a single tab for the same reason. On an Android devices there's a little undo popup to reopen tabs, but that kind of obvious touchscreen user-interface polish isn't there on ChromeOS yet 3. Two finger touchpad scroll doesn't work on Android apps for scrolling -- painful as heck when Wikipedia links open in the Android app in laptop mode Side note: I wish there was a good app to non-destructively markup PDF files with the stylus. I think it was at WWDC this year, Apple showed great work in this area, but sad not to have found software that appears as good for Chromebooks/Android yet. I know Google engineers will come across this post, so hopefully these pain points can be fixed eventually. Chromebook hardware is so good (and cheap), but there's a few painful areas still.

jordanthoms 9y ago
I don't usually plug on here but Kami ( web.kamihq.com ) lets you markup PDF documents on chromebooks, everything is kept as PDF annotations so they can be modified later. Stylus drawing on the Chromebook Plus works, though there's still some improvements I want to make to that - I have one as well and it's a great device, definitely my favorite out of the dozens of chromebooks we have at the office! (I'm a founder @ Kami)
- sumitgt 9y ago
  I want to use Kami, but I am worried by the fact that it asks for permission to your entire Google Drive. Why doesn't Kami use the "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file permission" scope that gives only access to files created or opened with the app?
  - 77ko 9y ago
    This. I wish Google Drive had a way to give apps permission to access only one folder. i.e I want Kami to be able to only access the "pdfs" folder in my drive. Right now it seems apps can either access everything or they are restricted to their own private app folder which is hidden somewhere in drive.
    - jordanthoms 9y ago
      Yeah, the permissions system in Google Drive is quite limited - the only to get things to work reliably is to request permissions for everything which is obviously not ideal.
  - jordanthoms 9y ago
    We used to use that, but unfortunately it's very buggy - we had many, many cases where a user would open a file with Kami, but the per-app permission would not be assigned by Google so it'd fail to open. For a while I had it so that we'd request the full drive access permission only if we hit that error, but in most cases it just meant we'd end up asking for permissions multiple times. Probably the best option I can suggest if you don't want the permission is to use the open from local file button and choose a file from your synced drive folder or from the virtual drive folder on Chromebooks. You will lose the auto-saving to drive though.
yohui 9y ago
> 3. Two finger touchpad scroll doesn't work on Android apps for scrolling -- painful as heck when Wikipedia links open in the Android app in laptop mode I think that's a bug with the Wikipedia app. Touchpad scrolling seems to work in most Android apps. The Firefox app also had this bug, but they fixed it.
- fattire 9y ago
  It's a bug with WebViews on Android apps on Chromebook: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=704051 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=704051 Any Android app that has a WebView (https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebVi...) seems to experience this bug. A workaround is to uninstall updates to the WebView package in the Play store, as the original shipping one does work with two-finger touchpad scrolling. If you star this issue, it may get more attention.
  - ibotty 9y ago
    Don't uninstall WebView updates! There are security relevant fixes included.
hsivonen 9y ago
Does it run aarch64 Crouton yet? (So far, Samsung Chromebook 2 + Crouton is the best setup I’ve found for 32-bit ARM development. Unlike phones and RPi form factor computers, it run at a stable clock speed under load, so it’s actually useful for comparing the performance of alternative implementations of a function. I’m wondering if Pro could be the aarch64 analog.)
nextos 9y ago
I love the Chromebook Asus C201PA. All RockChip ARM hardware. Supercheap and no proprietary firmware needed if you disable 3D acceleration, which is very slow anyway. A really unique machine. Targeted by LibreBoot of course.

jordanthoms 9y ago

I don't usually plug on here but Kami ( web.kamihq.com ) lets you markup PDF documents on chromebooks, everything is kept as PDF annotations so they can be modified later. Stylus drawing on the Chromebook Plus works, though there's still some improvements I want to make to that - I have one as well and it's a great device, definitely my favorite out of the dozens of chromebooks we have at the office! (I'm a founder @ Kami)

sumitgt 9y ago
I want to use Kami, but I am worried by the fact that it asks for permission to your entire Google Drive. Why doesn't Kami use the "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file permission" scope that gives only access to files created or opened with the app?
- 77ko 9y ago
  This. I wish Google Drive had a way to give apps permission to access only one folder. i.e I want Kami to be able to only access the "pdfs" folder in my drive. Right now it seems apps can either access everything or they are restricted to their own private app folder which is hidden somewhere in drive.
  - jordanthoms 9y ago
    Yeah, the permissions system in Google Drive is quite limited - the only to get things to work reliably is to request permissions for everything which is obviously not ideal.
- jordanthoms 9y ago
  We used to use that, but unfortunately it's very buggy - we had many, many cases where a user would open a file with Kami, but the per-app permission would not be assigned by Google so it'd fail to open. For a while I had it so that we'd request the full drive access permission only if we hit that error, but in most cases it just meant we'd end up asking for permissions multiple times. Probably the best option I can suggest if you don't want the permission is to use the open from local file button and choose a file from your synced drive folder or from the virtual drive folder on Chromebooks. You will lose the auto-saving to drive though.

yohui 9y ago

> 3. Two finger touchpad scroll doesn't work on Android apps for scrolling -- painful as heck when Wikipedia links open in the Android app in laptop mode I think that's a bug with the Wikipedia app. Touchpad scrolling seems to work in most Android apps. The Firefox app also had this bug, but they fixed it.

fattire 9y ago
It's a bug with WebViews on Android apps on Chromebook: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=704051 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=704051 Any Android app that has a WebView (https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebVi...) seems to experience this bug. A workaround is to uninstall updates to the WebView package in the Play store, as the original shipping one does work with two-finger touchpad scrolling. If you star this issue, it may get more attention.
- ibotty 9y ago
  Don't uninstall WebView updates! There are security relevant fixes included.

hsivonen 9y ago

Does it run aarch64 Crouton yet? (So far, Samsung Chromebook 2 + Crouton is the best setup I’ve found for 32-bit ARM development. Unlike phones and RPi form factor computers, it run at a stable clock speed under load, so it’s actually useful for comparing the performance of alternative implementations of a function. I’m wondering if Pro could be the aarch64 analog.)

nextos 9y ago

I love the Chromebook Asus C201PA. All RockChip ARM hardware. Supercheap and no proprietary firmware needed if you disable 3D acceleration, which is very slow anyway. A really unique machine. Targeted by LibreBoot of course.