Review: Samsung Chromebox

Was Chrome, as an OS still born?

I'm increasingly not seeing the point Chrome when I can buy a Windows device that does more the money. OTOH, as a desktop/Netbook play, I could see Android (with full Chrome browser experience) succeeding where Chrome is clearly failing.

Good review BTW; it's about time a reviewer took Chrome by the balls.

I wonder where these will end up?

Bargain bin or landfill?

when my raspberry pi comes

I'll have a better computer, in an altoids tin than this for 65 odd quid.

Better in that I own it, and can do what I like with it

Better in that I can work offline

Better in that raspberry pi dot com is not sluriping up everything I do and subjecting my life to an algorithm that then tries to sell me pole dancing lessons (as my gmail just did)

Huh

I really don't understand why they continue to peddle this shite.

Bin it and if they really must dabble in PC OSes do it with Android.

If it was £100 then I could see why some people might want one of these. As it is, you are paying more money for a system that will only run limited software and is almost useless with no internet connection. I just don't get who these things are aimed at.

Charles Calthrop - sorry but you are going to be very disappointed. Desktop environments on the Pi are currently /very/ slow to the point of being unusable in my opinion. The device is great for command-line programming but until someone writes a GPU accelerated driver for X it's not usable as a desktop PC for things like web browsing. But then that's also not really what it's designed for. To put things in perspective, the 700MHz ARM11 CPU it uses is roughly the same real speed as a Pentium II 300MHz so no where near the performance of that 1.9GHz Celeron.

Wait for the lawsuit

What's up with Samsung and ripping off Apple designs? There are a multitude of shapes their devices could take, so it's mysterious how often they come to resemble rival companies' designs.

As for chrome OS, Google ffs just dump this thing and fold the best things into Android.

@AC 11:33

You can use Google Docs offline: http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1628467

Get A Cheap Chinese Android Box

You can get a Chinese Android box for a lot less than this and it is going to give you just the same functionality.

Dear oh dear Google what are you thinking ?

DisplayPort

Will someone kick the PC makers and tell them to stop this nonsense and fit HDMI ports instead.

Not that it matters on this, I can't see anyone buying one anyway.

329 quid, what?

That's all I needed to know. That's insane.

What's the point at that price?

Could have been a slick XBMC machine

Going by the looks only, of course. Add an HDMI port, replace the intel part with AMD - and you've got the perfect HTPC..

Where a device like this could come in

Is where ISP's could supply one as part of a package. The ISP doesn't care about how it works off line.

So some punter wants this interwebby thing. ISP can offer the connection and a device to use on connection. Said device will be supported by ISP. Hey it plugs in and works. Can browse the interwebby and can read email. Maybe can tie into the ISP so doesn't work if leave. Not much to go wrong, if it breaks maybe send a remote reset and if still fails swap it out. Not much stored locally so don't need to wipe and customer doesn't loose important pictures and the like.

All this may take some special set up and the price needs to be a lot lower.

Hmmmm

I think there is market space for a device like this - self-contained, application focused. And Linux is perfect for this: you want something easily customized to the application space you want, robust and low-cost. And Linux runs on hardware both great and small. So this looks like it's in the right direction.

But I have a few reservations. It's a wee bit expensive. Okay, the Mac Mini is a couple of hundred more, but it's massively preferable to this if you're the sort of person who has the money available. If you're not the sort of person who has such money, then a mini-PC is a bit of a luxury anyway. You'd be better off just buying a cheap PC in the first place as pretty much everyone is familiar with such an environment.

Also, whilst I'm not really very familiar with Chrome OS, just looking at that Desktop seems weird. If the entire environment is accessed through the browser, then why on Earth make the browser a normal window floating on a Desktop? Why not make it a permanent full-screen affair and have tabs implemented in a way more similar to switching between applications like on Windows, KDE or Gnome? Why even have those icons in the bottom left? Just have a web-interface to the system settings and have a standard means of taking you back to that page when needed. It seems like a lot more thought could go into usability for this.

As regards the review, I'd be interested to know if the reviewer actually ever solved their problems. That helps us know if the situation was just them making a trivial mistake (which we all do, but shouldn't be held against something in a review) or if it is really deep-routed bad design or bugs.

Anyway, I'm sure we'll see better iterations of this, and probably cheaper versions in the future too.

Too much!

If it was closer to £100 I'd consider getting one and flicking that switch so I could install Linux instead. As it is, I don't need something costing £280 for that, plenty of cheaper options.

Behold!! This is the real Google quality!

This is the real quality of Google programmers ad engineers in broad daylight. Not when they have bought out and stolen an hobbled technology together (Android OS) but when they have to do all the ground work themselves (Chrome OS). Let's just be thankful that as custodians of Android they can get away with hiding their substandard skills from the general public!

Erm, if I were to buy one of these it would be for use as a web browser when plugged into my telly. How does it perform as a web browser? I have no fucking idea because it isn't mentioned in the review. The most important use for the box and it isn't mentioned. Now that's what I call a major review fail. I don't give a shit if it's hard to print from. Why would I want to? Get a grip.

Dragging to external devices

For what it's worth, I don't really know *what* to expect when it comes to dragging files around. I established in the 90s that Windows had different behaviour depending on the source and destination location, decided that this was one of Microsoft's usability nightmares (I have USB drives that don't behave like removable devices and systems that come up with their drives in a different order; worrying about the default behaviour is the last thing I want), and I've been right-mouse dragging files (and selecting copy or move from the menu) ever since. Oh, and occasionally I use Ctrl-X/Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. But then I was brought up on Acorn systems, which let you choose whether you wanted a copy or move by which mouse button you were doing it with, so trying to second-guess based on the device type was never a problem.

Not that this makes the Chromebox any more usable from the sounds of it, but "not like Windows" doesn't mean "broken". That statement is really quite often true.