Day 2: A Few Annoyances

My second day with the Cr-48 has been an interesting one. I know I am not supposed to be rating the hardware but I just can't resist. For the most part, I love it. The unit has a matte black look with an almost rubberized feel making it an enjoyable typing experience. As Brooke pointed out, it also looks very techy which probably does nothing but add to my liking of it. It is also void of any branding what so ever. Not a Google or Chrome logo to be seen. What I don't like, is the touch pad. Perhaps I will get used to it but I find my palm repeatedly hitting the pad as I am typing and moving the cursor to very undesirable locations, this could prove a problem during these blog posts.

On to my day, I sat down this morning and the first thing I did was login to LastPass, or I tried to anyway. LastPass is my key to the internet and therefore I keep it very secure. Along these lines I recently setup Multifactor Authentication on my account. For those who don't know, this requires me to run a small program which generates a key for any computer I have not previously authorized. The problem here is that to my knowledge, I have no means of running this small program from ChromeOS. I haven't figured out a solution to this one just yet.

My next goal was to configure the cloud printing options. This was a breeze. I signed in with my Windows desktop and enables the option from Chrome while signed in with my account. Once this was done I immediately had access to my local printer from the Cr-48. This could not have been simpler, go Google!

As someone who travels often I couldn't help but think about this device from an in-flight entertainment perspective. Here is where I think this device really falls short. Currently, from what I have seen, there is no working way to play media files stored on a USB device. In fact, there is no enabled way to view files stored on a USB device. However, I am not convinced that this is not in the works. After a little digging I found the about:flags page within Google Chrome.

I enabled the Media Player and Advanced File System with hopes of playing media on the Cr-48. The only difference I have seen is now when attaching any kind of storage it now displays a notification window that will scan the contents of the storage. It has never finished scanning my 8GB USB drive but did finish and eventually display a folder structure for a camera SD card with one photo on it. I wasn't able to navigate to the photo but I have hopes of seeing this feature in a future update.

Apps, you have to learn to love them despite their difficulties. It took much longer than it should have to embed the two photos in this blog. I used aviary to take the screenshots and do the editing. The struggle came with getting them into the blogger interface. Both systems try to make it simple - Aviary giving me full HTML and Blogger looking for only a URL - and therefore both conflict with each other. This is a minor gripe and no fault of the OS but unavoidable just the same.

Day 3 could be a slow one, as weekends normally are, but I'll update soon!