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Ralph Ainsley is in the market for
a PC laptop
Chromebooks! I want to know everything... Is there any local file storage? What happens when someone sends you an attachment on a Chromebook? Can I connect it to my television? Can you install programs on them? What are the best models?
posted 15 months ago
1 Answer
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Dan Gardener: A good baseline explanation of a Chromebook is to imagine a laptop with the Chrome web browser running on it, but no Windows Start Menu (or MacOS dock) and no "desktop" with folders full of files. It's just the web browser. If you're still with me, let's go through some of your questions. There is a somewhat limited experience of local file storage in two ways. First, the browser has its "download" file history. You can browse back through files you've downloaded in the past. And you can plug a memory stick into the USB port to browse those files. However the ChromeOS itself can only open a couple of filetypes, mainly images, audio, and movies. If you have Word documents on a memory stick, you won't be able to browse and open those directly. However, if you've ever used Gmail you know that it can open and display Word docs. You don't need to have Word on your computer, even. Gmail will just display the file to you as a Google Doc. You can open quite a few filetypes in this way, including powerpoint and excel docs too, PDFs, and an assortment of others.But no, for the most part you're intended to store your docs in GoogleDocs and browse them that way. Storage space is limited on the Chromebooks we've seen so far: 16GB of flash memory, and the OS is going to take up a lot of that. Google recently added NTFS support so that a wider range of hard drives and other storage would be compatible. But the whole point of owning a Chromebook is to free yourself of file storage and go with the cloud. This might sound a little crazy now, but people once thought it was insane for Apple to omit a floppy drive from the original iMac. And if you've ever emailed a file to yourself you already understand the basic principle of storing your files in the cloud so you can get to them from anywhere. You may be guessing by now what happens when someone sends you an attachment. You'll open it within Gmail in view it using the GoogleDoc viewer. Here's some information about the complete list of filetypes it can display. Support keeps growing. Even Powerpoint and Photoshop files will open - for *viewing* not necessarily editing. There's a full list of what's supported at this page: http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1738646The Samsung models I've seen do not have TV-out ports. They do have VGA-out which is the most common style of computer monitor connector. Many modern TVs can accept this. Televisions often call it "PC Input" so check yours. As for programs, no. You cannot install what you would think of as "setup.exe" programs. However you can make use of the Chrome App Store, which is full of interesting apps that are sort of like web utilities / plugins / HTML5 applications. It's a sort of in-between world of little games like Angry Birds and some more useful stuff like Zoho Office. You can browse what's there at this page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/homeSo far Samsung is the primary manufacturer of Chromebooks. They have some of the best Android phones out there so it's not surprising to see them partner with Google on this new platform.I think the idea of the Chromebook is pretty interesting but a few pieces are still missing for me. The devices are relatively underpowered compared to an ordinary laptop. And the prices aren't yet low enough to make up for the limitations. Chromebooks have a couple of really nice standoutfeatures, like long battery life (8+ hours) and instant-on operation. But if you really want to put your digital life in the cloud, you can do this with an ordinary laptop that costs about the same but doesn't have the limitations.15 months ago -
