8 ms·

Reviewing the $250 Samsung Chromebook as a Developer

71 points by omni 14y ago

bhickey 14y ago
Apple offers both matte and glossy finishes on their notebooks This has not been the case for years.
- omni 14y ago
  Ah, looks like you're mostly right. They don't do that anymore, but when I bought my MBP in early 2012, I did have the option. I'll correct the article, thanks.
  - bhickey 14y ago
    Hrm. I thought they dropped the option in mid-2011.
    - pyre 14y ago
      Maybe they just did an excellent job of convincing him that he had a choice, and funnelling him to the only option available.
      - bdc 14y ago
        A chapter from Henry Ford's playbook
- elithrar 14y ago
  Non-Retina 15" models still have a matte option.
- lenazegher 14y ago
  Do some people actually prefer glossy to matte? I find the use of glossy screens on notebooks bewildering. What's the benefit of having lots of distracting reflections on your screen?
city41 14y ago
I received the same Chromebook on Thursday, and also gave Crouton a shot. I pretty much completely agree with this review. Although I've since ditched Crouton and returned to the verified OS, at least for now. Overall the machine and ChromeOS are very pleasant, and I hope this style of computing keeps growing and catches on. The hardware is very impressive for $250. I especially find the keyboard and trackpad very functional, much more so than many PC laptops that cost 4x as much or even more. The wifi issues are very annoying, and I suspect they are at the hardware level and probably not fixable. I would have gladly paid another $20-50 or whatever it would have taken to get a better wifi chip in the machine. Another alternative to Crouton is using dev_install, which is how Chrome OS developers get a decent dev environment going on their machines. I've not yet tried this, but plan to. I truly hope to eventually find myself using ChromeOS as it was intended and still developing with it. This basically means using something like Cloud9. Oh and another thing I am finding nice about this machine is it's a great test bed for HTML5 games. The current game I am working on crashes on the Chromebook if I enable sound, I suspect I am loading too many sound files and running out of memory. It's good to have a handy "lower end" baseline to test things with. EDIT: I forgot to mention, I really wish ChromeOS would let me pin bookmarks to the taskbar. You can only pin apps, not websites.
- djeikyb 14y ago
  I might not have bought this machine if I'd known about the wifi problems. I'm in an apartment with eight to ten ssids visible on each channel. My other wifi devices work great, but the chromebook frequently lost connection. As in, lose connection, try-fail, try-fail, try-fail, try-succeed just long enough to load another page, repeat. I've mitigated the problem somewhat by boosting the signal strength (thanks to tomato+linksys-wrt54gl). Other than that I'm pretty happy with it. I do spend most of my time in the ssh app..
  - VLM 14y ago
    "I do spend most of my time in the ssh app." Is there a decent VNC client? Also is this a "real" SSH client like I can X-window forward and share ssh keys or just a "sorta SSH" like I'm better off using ajaxterm? For portable use I've been using a very old netbook with android-x86 installed for some years now, but I'm not too happy with the (pitiful) battery life and I've used the heck out of it so I'm sure the battery is not long for this world. So its either a new chromebook or something like a new android tablet with a bluetooth keyboard is in my near future. Its probably going to be the tablet/keyboard route unless something/someone convinces me a chromebook would be better.
obilgic 14y ago
250$ Samsung Chromebook is the greatest mobile device I have ever owned. I hope they release new version of it every year with 250$ price tag but lighter, smaller, faster and with longer battery life. I will buy that new version every year.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Their goal should be 10h of battery life for this year's model, which would be easily achieved by increasing its tiny battery. Unfortunately, I think they will have other priorities with it, which means they'll have to keep the battery tiny again to cut costs and be able to use the other stuff they plan for it. If I were to build the next Chromebook, I'd put 802.11ac Wi-fi in it, increase battery life to 10h, use a quad core 2 Ghz Cortex A15 chip, and probably leave the resolution the same for this year (so it doesn't nullify the 50% bigger battery I'd use), but use a higher quality IPS panel. And probably try to increase the quality of the build, too, a bit, as long as it costs me as much as they did last year. I think all of those are doable for this year's $250 Chromebook.
  - jsnell 14y ago
    The battery is comparable to that in a macbook air (30 vs 35 Wh).
pwnna 14y ago
I don't remember exactly, but isn't there an option to completely get rid of ChromeOS and install ubuntu? Does that work better? I'm thinking of buying some as gifts, but preloaded it with Ubuntu instead. Is that feasible?
- brigade 14y ago
  There's ChrUbuntu, which is easy to install but gives a barely functional trackpad, no sound, and a 75% chance of hanging on wake. Supposedly 13.04 is significantly better, but upgrading is stupidly hard and I've yet to manage to do so (currently trying to figure out how to work around a known bug in Plymouth.) But even then, OpenGL ES may or may not work yet, and unity apparently doesn't work in 13.04.
  - ariwilson 14y ago
    Those issues have all been fixed (well I never heard of the hanging on wake issue) FYI. http://www.whatthetech.info/samsungchromebook/ http://www.whatthetech.info/samsungchromebook/
    - brigade 14y ago
      Not in the default (or default-updated) 12.04 ChrUbuntu install, unless something has changed in the last 6 hours. Also using the Arch files only half fixes the trackpad - using the physical button is still very finicky compared to Chrome OS. The hang on wake issue I see might be "Auto-suspend/closing lid crashes Ubuntu" in your list, which lists no known fix. And your workaround [1] for audio is explicitly dangerous with the stock kernel (I know Marcin Juszkiewicz's kernel for 13.04 has a fix so you won't melt your speakers, but it seems ChrUbuntu hasn't adopted it as of two weeks ago) [1] http://www.whatthetech.info/fixing-sound-chromebook-chrubuntu/comment-page-1/#comment-228 http://www.whatthetech.info/fixing-sound-chromebook-chrubunt...
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - emidln 14y ago
somecallmechief 14y ago
While I haven't tried Crouton, I've been able to get quite a lot of Development work done on my Chromebook thanks to tools like Cloud9. If you opt-in to the dev channel for ChromeOS, updates start coming in much faster (and generally very stable at that).
- omni 14y ago
  Thanks for the advice, I'll look into using Cloud9 and the dev channel.
andrewflnr 14y ago
The thing I was most worried about was battery life. It must have been a different one where the advertised battery life was 4 hours. 6+ hours for $250 is much more tempting.
- justinschuh 14y ago
  The $200 Acer model is the one with the low battery life, in large part because it has an HDD.
  - ecspike 14y ago
    You can also upgrade the Acer to a SSD and you might be able to upgrade its RAM.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    And its Celeron chip.
mkdir 14y ago
> Unfortunately, there seems to be no option to change the way apps are opened. If you right click on an app's icon, you can select "Open as window" or "Open maximized", both of which emulate the traditional model. Unfortunately, maximized apps always feature a pair of floating buttons (unmaximize and close) in the top right corner. I bought my Chromebook in a desperate attempt to satiate my urge to buy a much-more-expensive MacBook Air, and I'd say it's working. To be honest, I spend most of my time in the SSH app, but web browsing is surprisingly smooth given the machine's price. The extra-wide (and extra tall!) left control and left alt keys are a welcomed touch, and, like Travis noted, battery life has been better than expected.
ecspike 14y ago
I've had the machine since December and crouton since early February after trying Chrubuntu and Bodhi Linux. It has worked fairly well. I haven't had the Wi-Fi problems besides not wanting to connect to my cell via Wi-Fi tether. And every monitor I've tried has worked. I have noticed that the chroot can cause the battery to falsely report. Other than those minor issues, it has become a reliable coffee shop coding machine for me.
- omni 14y ago
  Did you have to make any changes to get external monitors to work well? Mind going into detail if you did?
ahi 14y ago
Sort of sounds broken. I expect $250 devices to work as advertised.
fierarul 14y ago
Just the other day I connected an external display to my Acer C7 Chromebook and I was able to use both displays just fine (even tried an 1080p video on the external one). So this problem that you cannot extend the desktop on the 2nd display looks like a device issue, not an OS one.
- xmodem 14y ago
  This is an ARM device - may very well be a hardware or driver issue - hopefully one that can and will be fixed in a software update.
sasvari 14y ago
Anybody around running archlinux ARM [0] on it and kind enough to share his experiences and insides? [0] http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung-chromebook http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung-chromebook
- djeikyb 14y ago
  I tried with a usb stick. Couldn't get to bash prompt, think it might be hanging looking for root on an sd card. Since the instructions say use an sd card, assuming it's my fault. Chrooting seems to work just fine..except the networking seems messed up. Can hit ip addresses, but not domain names. But here again, I'd guess it's some dumb mistake that a little rtfm and troubleshooting should fix.
  - 1SaltwaterC 14y ago
    Non configured /etc/resolv.conf. A common issue with chroot setups.
deepGem 14y ago
My chromebook doesn't suffer from the WIFI issues reported in this article. One key issue with the crosh from a developer perspective is the lack of a copy and paste option. You can't copy content from another chrome window into the crosh terminal. Seriously affects development but then it also indirectly let's you type and remember commands :)
- Sambdala 14y ago
  I have no issues using a two-finger tap to paste content into the chrosh terminal.
irmbrady 14y ago
>The keyboard has dedicated volume and brightness keys but lacks media player buttons. A very minor point to take away from the article; but do people actually use the media player buttons on their keyboard? I use brightness and volume buttons all the time; but I do not ever recall using the media buttons on my laptops/desktops in the same way as I would on other media device (phone, mp3 player, etc). If I wish to switch song on my laptop, I tend to open my media player and select one which I actually want to listen to, rather than be at the mercy of shuffle.
- morsch 14y ago
  Yes, I use the media buttons constantly, play/pause in particular as well as forward. I'm sure I'm not the only one. To make this post more valuable, here's a link to the script I use to make it work with Spotify/Ubuntu: http://code.google.com/p/spotify-notify/ http://code.google.com/p/spotify-notify/
- OnionChamp 14y ago
  The ability to control your media player without opening its window is great, but you don't need dedicated buttons for that. I've been using global hotkeys for it for years, with the following pretty handy configuration: shift+alt+s for play/pause, q and a for prev and next song, x and c for volume down and up, and z for play random song.
saturdaysaint 14y ago
Funny, I just talked to a consumer that called his new Chromebook "useless" due to wi-fi problems; since I hadn't heard of this, I assumed he had a bad router. Being an inherently connected device sure makes this a more showstopping issue.
Sambdala 14y ago
I think a lot of the negative experiences can be avoided if you try to stay in ChromeOS as much as possible. I think some of the hardware issues are also device-specific as I have an Acer C7, and I haven't run into any of the issues he's mentioned. The point of the Chromebook is you're accessing everything from the cloud on a thin client. A lot of the personal gains I've found from using my Chromebook is that I'm not setting everything I use up in such a way that I can access everything I use from any computer connected to the internet. The fact that it's a super-cheap and super-small laptop that's great to travel with is just a bonus.
- omni 14y ago
  It does seem likely that the ARM Chromebook is having some device-specific hardware issues, both due to its cost and because it is lagging behind the other devices in terms of getting OS updates.

71 points by omni 14y ago

bhickey 14y ago

Apple offers both matte and glossy finishes on their notebooks This has not been the case for years.

omni 14y ago
Ah, looks like you're mostly right. They don't do that anymore, but when I bought my MBP in early 2012, I did have the option. I'll correct the article, thanks.
- bhickey 14y ago
  Hrm. I thought they dropped the option in mid-2011.
  - pyre 14y ago
    Maybe they just did an excellent job of convincing him that he had a choice, and funnelling him to the only option available.
    - bdc 14y ago
      A chapter from Henry Ford's playbook
elithrar 14y ago
Non-Retina 15" models still have a matte option.
lenazegher 14y ago
Do some people actually prefer glossy to matte? I find the use of glossy screens on notebooks bewildering. What's the benefit of having lots of distracting reflections on your screen?

city41 14y ago

I received the same Chromebook on Thursday, and also gave Crouton a shot. I pretty much completely agree with this review. Although I've since ditched Crouton and returned to the verified OS, at least for now. Overall the machine and ChromeOS are very pleasant, and I hope this style of computing keeps growing and catches on. The hardware is very impressive for $250. I especially find the keyboard and trackpad very functional, much more so than many PC laptops that cost 4x as much or even more. The wifi issues are very annoying, and I suspect they are at the hardware level and probably not fixable. I would have gladly paid another $20-50 or whatever it would have taken to get a better wifi chip in the machine. Another alternative to Crouton is using dev_install, which is how Chrome OS developers get a decent dev environment going on their machines. I've not yet tried this, but plan to. I truly hope to eventually find myself using ChromeOS as it was intended and still developing with it. This basically means using something like Cloud9. Oh and another thing I am finding nice about this machine is it's a great test bed for HTML5 games. The current game I am working on crashes on the Chromebook if I enable sound, I suspect I am loading too many sound files and running out of memory. It's good to have a handy "lower end" baseline to test things with. EDIT: I forgot to mention, I really wish ChromeOS would let me pin bookmarks to the taskbar. You can only pin apps, not websites.

djeikyb 14y ago
I might not have bought this machine if I'd known about the wifi problems. I'm in an apartment with eight to ten ssids visible on each channel. My other wifi devices work great, but the chromebook frequently lost connection. As in, lose connection, try-fail, try-fail, try-fail, try-succeed just long enough to load another page, repeat. I've mitigated the problem somewhat by boosting the signal strength (thanks to tomato+linksys-wrt54gl). Other than that I'm pretty happy with it. I do spend most of my time in the ssh app..
- VLM 14y ago
  "I do spend most of my time in the ssh app." Is there a decent VNC client? Also is this a "real" SSH client like I can X-window forward and share ssh keys or just a "sorta SSH" like I'm better off using ajaxterm? For portable use I've been using a very old netbook with android-x86 installed for some years now, but I'm not too happy with the (pitiful) battery life and I've used the heck out of it so I'm sure the battery is not long for this world. So its either a new chromebook or something like a new android tablet with a bluetooth keyboard is in my near future. Its probably going to be the tablet/keyboard route unless something/someone convinces me a chromebook would be better.

obilgic 14y ago

250$ Samsung Chromebook is the greatest mobile device I have ever owned. I hope they release new version of it every year with 250$ price tag but lighter, smaller, faster and with longer battery life. I will buy that new version every year.

mtgx 14y ago
Their goal should be 10h of battery life for this year's model, which would be easily achieved by increasing its tiny battery. Unfortunately, I think they will have other priorities with it, which means they'll have to keep the battery tiny again to cut costs and be able to use the other stuff they plan for it. If I were to build the next Chromebook, I'd put 802.11ac Wi-fi in it, increase battery life to 10h, use a quad core 2 Ghz Cortex A15 chip, and probably leave the resolution the same for this year (so it doesn't nullify the 50% bigger battery I'd use), but use a higher quality IPS panel. And probably try to increase the quality of the build, too, a bit, as long as it costs me as much as they did last year. I think all of those are doable for this year's $250 Chromebook.
- jsnell 14y ago
  The battery is comparable to that in a macbook air (30 vs 35 Wh).

pwnna 14y ago

I don't remember exactly, but isn't there an option to completely get rid of ChromeOS and install ubuntu? Does that work better? I'm thinking of buying some as gifts, but preloaded it with Ubuntu instead. Is that feasible?

brigade 14y ago
There's ChrUbuntu, which is easy to install but gives a barely functional trackpad, no sound, and a 75% chance of hanging on wake. Supposedly 13.04 is significantly better, but upgrading is stupidly hard and I've yet to manage to do so (currently trying to figure out how to work around a known bug in Plymouth.) But even then, OpenGL ES may or may not work yet, and unity apparently doesn't work in 13.04.
- ariwilson 14y ago
  Those issues have all been fixed (well I never heard of the hanging on wake issue) FYI. http://www.whatthetech.info/samsungchromebook/ http://www.whatthetech.info/samsungchromebook/
  - brigade 14y ago
    Not in the default (or default-updated) 12.04 ChrUbuntu install, unless something has changed in the last 6 hours. Also using the Arch files only half fixes the trackpad - using the physical button is still very finicky compared to Chrome OS. The hang on wake issue I see might be "Auto-suspend/closing lid crashes Ubuntu" in your list, which lists no known fix. And your workaround [1] for audio is explicitly dangerous with the stock kernel (I know Marcin Juszkiewicz's kernel for 13.04 has a fix so you won't melt your speakers, but it seems ChrUbuntu hasn't adopted it as of two weeks ago) [1] http://www.whatthetech.info/fixing-sound-chromebook-chrubuntu/comment-page-1/#comment-228 http://www.whatthetech.info/fixing-sound-chromebook-chrubunt...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- emidln 14y ago

somecallmechief 14y ago

While I haven't tried Crouton, I've been able to get quite a lot of Development work done on my Chromebook thanks to tools like Cloud9. If you opt-in to the dev channel for ChromeOS, updates start coming in much faster (and generally very stable at that).

omni 14y ago
Thanks for the advice, I'll look into using Cloud9 and the dev channel.

andrewflnr 14y ago

The thing I was most worried about was battery life. It must have been a different one where the advertised battery life was 4 hours. 6+ hours for $250 is much more tempting.

justinschuh 14y ago
The $200 Acer model is the one with the low battery life, in large part because it has an HDD.
- ecspike 14y ago
  You can also upgrade the Acer to a SSD and you might be able to upgrade its RAM.
- mtgx 14y ago
  And its Celeron chip.

mkdir 14y ago

> Unfortunately, there seems to be no option to change the way apps are opened. If you right click on an app's icon, you can select "Open as window" or "Open maximized", both of which emulate the traditional model. Unfortunately, maximized apps always feature a pair of floating buttons (unmaximize and close) in the top right corner. I bought my Chromebook in a desperate attempt to satiate my urge to buy a much-more-expensive MacBook Air, and I'd say it's working. To be honest, I spend most of my time in the SSH app, but web browsing is surprisingly smooth given the machine's price. The extra-wide (and extra tall!) left control and left alt keys are a welcomed touch, and, like Travis noted, battery life has been better than expected.

ecspike 14y ago

I've had the machine since December and crouton since early February after trying Chrubuntu and Bodhi Linux. It has worked fairly well. I haven't had the Wi-Fi problems besides not wanting to connect to my cell via Wi-Fi tether. And every monitor I've tried has worked. I have noticed that the chroot can cause the battery to falsely report. Other than those minor issues, it has become a reliable coffee shop coding machine for me.

omni 14y ago
Did you have to make any changes to get external monitors to work well? Mind going into detail if you did?

ahi 14y ago

Sort of sounds broken. I expect $250 devices to work as advertised.

fierarul 14y ago

Just the other day I connected an external display to my Acer C7 Chromebook and I was able to use both displays just fine (even tried an 1080p video on the external one). So this problem that you cannot extend the desktop on the 2nd display looks like a device issue, not an OS one.

xmodem 14y ago
This is an ARM device - may very well be a hardware or driver issue - hopefully one that can and will be fixed in a software update.

sasvari 14y ago

Anybody around running archlinux ARM [0] on it and kind enough to share his experiences and insides? [0] http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung-chromebook http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung-chromebook

djeikyb 14y ago
I tried with a usb stick. Couldn't get to bash prompt, think it might be hanging looking for root on an sd card. Since the instructions say use an sd card, assuming it's my fault. Chrooting seems to work just fine..except the networking seems messed up. Can hit ip addresses, but not domain names. But here again, I'd guess it's some dumb mistake that a little rtfm and troubleshooting should fix.
- 1SaltwaterC 14y ago
  Non configured /etc/resolv.conf. A common issue with chroot setups.

deepGem 14y ago

My chromebook doesn't suffer from the WIFI issues reported in this article. One key issue with the crosh from a developer perspective is the lack of a copy and paste option. You can't copy content from another chrome window into the crosh terminal. Seriously affects development but then it also indirectly let's you type and remember commands :)

Sambdala 14y ago
I have no issues using a two-finger tap to paste content into the chrosh terminal.

irmbrady 14y ago

>The keyboard has dedicated volume and brightness keys but lacks media player buttons. A very minor point to take away from the article; but do people actually use the media player buttons on their keyboard? I use brightness and volume buttons all the time; but I do not ever recall using the media buttons on my laptops/desktops in the same way as I would on other media device (phone, mp3 player, etc). If I wish to switch song on my laptop, I tend to open my media player and select one which I actually want to listen to, rather than be at the mercy of shuffle.

morsch 14y ago
Yes, I use the media buttons constantly, play/pause in particular as well as forward. I'm sure I'm not the only one. To make this post more valuable, here's a link to the script I use to make it work with Spotify/Ubuntu: http://code.google.com/p/spotify-notify/ http://code.google.com/p/spotify-notify/
OnionChamp 14y ago
The ability to control your media player without opening its window is great, but you don't need dedicated buttons for that. I've been using global hotkeys for it for years, with the following pretty handy configuration: shift+alt+s for play/pause, q and a for prev and next song, x and c for volume down and up, and z for play random song.

saturdaysaint 14y ago

Funny, I just talked to a consumer that called his new Chromebook "useless" due to wi-fi problems; since I hadn't heard of this, I assumed he had a bad router. Being an inherently connected device sure makes this a more showstopping issue.

Sambdala 14y ago

I think a lot of the negative experiences can be avoided if you try to stay in ChromeOS as much as possible. I think some of the hardware issues are also device-specific as I have an Acer C7, and I haven't run into any of the issues he's mentioned. The point of the Chromebook is you're accessing everything from the cloud on a thin client. A lot of the personal gains I've found from using my Chromebook is that I'm not setting everything I use up in such a way that I can access everything I use from any computer connected to the internet. The fact that it's a super-cheap and super-small laptop that's great to travel with is just a bonus.

omni 14y ago
It does seem likely that the ARM Chromebook is having some device-specific hardware issues, both due to its cost and because it is lagging behind the other devices in terms of getting OS updates.