Google ChromeOS CR-48.

[KSoD]

If ChromeOS is anything like Flow that is out there, then it is not going to be very useful to home users who love and live off of local storage. I have tried Flow and I used it for all of about 10 minutes and dropped it just as fast. I had no way to access anything on any drive, I could not save anything to my drives and everything was done via the Chrome Browser.

To me that is a Cloud Based OS. While it may load in RAM, it still doesnt have anything stored in your local hard drive. I have heard rumors that these systems wont even have a hard drive. So loading in RAM is not to me considered local and is considered RAM cause if I pull the power, the OS is gone. Just like any information stored in RAM.

So clearly ChromeOS has gotten away from what they first stated it was going to be and went with something else. No where on their page does it say anything about local storage. They only talk about the Cloud. It isnt confusing when they hand out demo units that are doing something different than what their website is saying.

 

[Jayce]

Last I spoke to the developers, they were going to implement local storage since there was a huge outcry for local music/media/documents, despite the cloud goal they had wanted. While they said they would remedy that situation, they were very very persistent with "a lot could change yet", so I'm not sure how that should be taken. On one hand I wouldn't be surprised if your only local storage is SD/USB based. On the other, it wouldn't surprise me if they shoved a decent hard drive in there just for local storage alone.

Being I've used ChromeOS for quite a while now, I'm still sticking to my bottom line opinion of it. If you want an iPad-like device that has a laptop form factor, is affordable, reliable, and easy to use, ChromeOS is the golden key. It's not for a systems administrator who needs a ton of features or the weekend DJ who has a digital library of music exceeding terabytes in size.

It's for grandpa who wants to check email to keep in touch with his son who works in a very different time zone, making calls difficult.
It's for mom who only uses facebook and amazon.
It's for the traveling businessman who needs good battery life and constant email access to the office.
It's for your child, who needs a computer for school research and need not be distracted by gaming functionality or other unnecessary features.

There is a truckload of potential here. And while I acknowledge that, it's just not *the* system for me in particular. Computers can be a scary thing to some people, and often time with how much maintenance they can require with viruses, malware, updates, etc... people get turned off by it. In this case, none of that is an issue.

This suggests ChromeOS being an excellent choice for the basic user.

 

[aikbix]

The philosophy of minimalism is quite nice for an operating system. It would do well if they decided to keep that philosophy while adding basic features that many people have come to accept as the paradigm of an operating system.