I just recieved my Chromebook in the mail last night and I was super excited. I thought the test flight program had ceased, so I figured I'd probably never really have hands on with the Chrome OS. Now that I've had the device for around 20 hours, I don't feel like I would be missing much. 

The concept is great: you spend most of your time in a browser anyway, so that's all Chrome will give you. That might be great for 75% of the world, but for a system administrator, it doesn't do anything I need it to do. While I'm on the topic of "normal people," almost everyone that checked out the CR-48 at work today asked where the rest of it is. 

I figured I'd go through day 1 with the Chromebook so you can see the challenges I faced while attempting to use it.

When I showed up at work (at a bank), I went to connect the machine to the network. Oh wait, what's that? Wifi-only? No Ethernet? Well, that sums up the day. I couldn't even use it. More secure enviroments don't allow wifi, so no Internet really kills the Chromebooks usability. I didn't want that to stop me, so I continued to use my desktop, primarily using just the Chrome browser. 

There are really two things I have to have in order to survive in my line of work. First is a CLI of sorts. I need to be able to SSH and telnet to devices. Second is a terminal services/VNC/RDC connection. Chromebook provides none of those things. (Even the SSH clients in the Web Store require Java Runtime Environment, which cannot run on the Chromebook.) It's such a let down.

I came home, excited to have another go with the Chromebook, but I need to lauch a site. I can't access my server in any way. The only thing I can think to do with this thing is surf the web and write blog posts about how limiting the Chromebook is. Even that is difficult because of the crummy trackpad. Scrolling is atrocious, the edge of my thumbs click clicking elsewhere on the page, repositioning the cursor, highlighting and deleting text. Oh this is so much fun!

Real quick, a list of must-haves before I feel this device can make it in any kind of professional environment and a short list of pros:

Cons

• No VPN
• No SSH/Telnet
• No VNC/RDC
• Crappy trackpad

Pros

• Really fast startup/resume
• Long battery life
• Built in Verizon 3G
• Price 

With these things in mind, I can't recommend the device to any serious computer user. Even the trackpad would seriously frustrate the casual user. Maybe the new hardware manufacturers will address that issue before it launches in June. At that point, the surfers of the world should be happy, but if you want to do anything besides browse the web, keep looking. 

Update: I was able to get the Cr-48 into developer mode which allows the user to access the Linux core. From there I could SSH to my server and such. The only downside is I have to hit CTRL+D and look at a frowny face every time I reboot. :)