Saturday, February 5, 2011

Two days with CR-48 - Part Un

On our way to work yesterday, S and I stopped at our housing office to retrieve a package UPS left there the previous day. We were a bit surprised, because neither of us had ordered anything online for a while. The size of the package wasn't revealing either - a midsized box, fairly nondescript. So when S cut open the box, none of us were quite expecting what was waiting for us inside.

It was a box with familiar markings - that I have seen many times on several websites, including this one - of the components for a DIY assembly of a spaceship!


OMG!!

It was a brand new Google CR-48, ChromeOS notebook! To be more precise, this is the OneTrue™ Netbook, which uses a (mostly) web-based OS and web-based interface, with continuous syncing with the Cloud. One of Google's USP for the CR-48 is that even if your device goes under a steamroller, you can always get another device and get everything - every piece of data - back without any hassle. Talk about data security!!

On opening the box, there were simple instructions, on a brown piece of cardboard. Imagine that! A brown piece of cardboard. And the stuff that were written on it - they were amazing! Succinct and funny; never have I had so much fun from reading instructions (RTFM - wink, wink, nudge, nudge!)


N.B.You should really read it; you can read and/or download a PDF at the Scribd site. But of course, I must remember to mention that the back of the box had dire warnings about the battery.


There was another single sheet with the diagram of the keys and the device. Notice the top row of keys, no function keys like a regular keyboard, only special keys with web functions.


Now, to take it out of the box


In what is probably the worst case of pareidolia, we see the box benignly smiling at us, encouraging us to open it...


Now, to take it out of the box and open it for a quick look-see...


Hidden underneath the device was a nice set of stickers, one for the cover, and other smaller ones for decoration.


Careful application of the sticker and this is how our CR-48 looked like prior to the final step, the boot-up. Beautiful, innit?



Continue on to Part Deux for the actual usage experience...

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