I've read that it's a 30Wh battery on G+ and Engadget. That 6.5 hour runtime doesn't sound very good to me for a 11.6" ARM device with that size battery. My 11.6" MBA with a SB i5 gets 5 hours off a 35Wh battery while browsing the web for comparison, and that's with a heavier OS at that.
If anything, I'd say they're being safe rather than sorry by quoting such a low number. My bet is that this device averages 8 hours minimum...
however, if we set my assumptions aside and consider your argument, I will point out that the MBA has four times the budget to put into each component, allowing them to fine tune each component to use as little power as possible, and the battery is LiPo instead of Li-Ion, plus a better quality display panel can draw significantly less power. The same could be said to a lesser extent of WiFi and Bluetooth.
Apple is a master at their craft.
I can't wait for full reviews of this device, and I so wish that I could run Ubuntu for ARM or some other ARM distro on here. We'll see.
Just to clear things up: lithium polymer batteries ARE lithium-ion. The major difference is that in a traditional Li-ion battery, the electrolyte (a lithium salt) is held within an organic solvent, whereas with a Lithium-ion polymer battery, the electrolyte is held by a polymer.
I agree in principal with your statements. Hopefully you don't construe this to be an attack on you.
According to modern convention, while a lithium polymer battery may indeed be a lithium ion battery, people refer to advanced polymer batteries as polymer and more generic lithium batteries as ion.
I appreciate specificity, as it's the only way to preclude misinterpretations, but I would say he used typically accepted wordage.
Possible. Can't say I know the last time I saw a product where the battery estimates undercut the actual time you get. Apple usually got fairly spot on with their, most other companies exaggerate a lot (or simply don't test under reasonable conditions).
Heck if Samsungs phone battery life specs are anything to go by you should be happy if it comes anywhere near those six hours even :p
30Wh/6hours = 5W for the Chromebook 35Wh/5hours = 7W for the MacBook Air
The display backlight consumes most of the power. Both have the same display resolution, thus equal display backlight, thus their display should consume about the same power. Most of the other internals consume similar power, too. The SSD in the Macbook air idles while web browsing so no real difference here either, the Air has more RAM, but the difference is maybe 0.2W in the end. So 2W more for the SB i5 while idling, sounds reasonable for me. We also don't know how Google measured the battery life. While idling, web browsing, movie playback, what display brightness? So better wait for reviews to see make a real comparison.
It's called "race to idle." While the SB i5 in your MacBook Air uses a lot more power under load than a Cortex-A15, it's also leaps and bounds more powerful. Therefore, it gets its work done faster and returns to the all-important idle state sooner, allowing for better battery life in a simple workload like web browsing.
Put both machines under continuous load until the batteries died, and I'm sure the ARM notebook would last a fair bit longer. Then again, it would also get less done.
Chromium Browser is being fully optimized for online use on ARM A15. The mainboard design, bandwidth, i/o, power usage, SSD are being optimized for this purpose as well. The SSD powers down and A15 throttles down for online use to save on Mali 605 GPU power usage. While doing general web browsing, we can expect to get much longer power usage and that's what they've been shooting for with this first ARM powered Ultrabook!
Charbax goes into additional details on his ARM page, in explaining just how Cloud Computing is set to change our Online Connected World in the Future with Chrome OS: http://armdevices.net/2012/10/21/how-i-think-that-...
Charbax has been on the cutting edge of ARM computing for years. He was the first to get a look at Samsung's F700 in August September and is mostly the one who leaked photos in early October. He described SGH-Z610 (FCC in August 2006) as the precursor to the Apple iPhone, when it was first shown in January 2006. A whole year before iPhone came out. No doubt he has direct connections inside Samsung. Even Apple was aware of this Multi-media Touchscreen Gesture Based Smartphone w/ it's single round physical Play/Home button on front. In fact they used the processor in iPhone. Anyone smart should pay attention to what he says and there is absolutely no doubt about that! (even though he has toned down his leaks in recent years, he still gets inside info)
Consider this; at $249 the Samsung ARM Chromebook is an excellent deal and no doubt, at this early stage has lots of room to be optimized and you may find some of his claims a little too outrageous. But he's made them before and been right the majority of the time. Right now that future 20 hour usage on this ARM A15 Ultrabook may sound ridiculous, but we haven't seen even half of what ARM and Samsung have put into the Exynos Processor.
Remember too..... that had Samsung a8 Inte gone with ARM's recommendation and dropped Intrinsity inside of deciding to o partner with Apple on Hummingbird share the costs when Intrinsity was in dire financial straits and over the due date, they would have been better off. ARM would be too, because they wanted SAMSUNG to be first to build an all ARM Chip with Mali GPU, Artisan, etc. But wanted energy efficient CPU to go with Imagination GPU for power to run iPad. ARM was having trouble getting any fab or device maker to take a shot on Mali. Low n behold SAMSUNG should have dropped Apple and Intrinsity...... eaten their losses and Gone all ARM then! .......ARM Logic Energy Efficient design Optimizations were every bit as good as Intrinsity's
This would be the perfect computer for my parents. They literally don't use anything other than the browser, and are already hooked into the Google ecosystem thanks to Android and Gmail, so this would suit them well.
Would be great if you could get your hands on it and do a proper review, especially as this is the first A15 device in the wild!
Puh-leeze. This fails on all measures. If you mean first PC without x86 overall, well, it's patently NOT (see half the stuff at http://oldcomputers.net). If you mean first Windows PC, oops, it's not a Windows PC. If you mean first… oh hell, you get the idea.
Indeed. Go back 15 years and you can find non-x86 hardware running Windows. I wouldn't classify them as PC's as they were more workstations or servers but they existed. In a similar vein, until recently MS supported a command line version of Windows on Itanium systems.
Also around that time Apple has moved to PowerPC from the Motorola 68k line, both radically different architectures than x86. Then again, one could go about calling them Macs instead of PC's.
There is also the Crusoe chip which was non-x86 but ran x86 software by merit of binary translation software and ran Windows.
I guess no one remembers the ARMH promoted "smartbook" category: an ARM powered laptop. I predict doom as long as you can't play games on it. At least we'll have knowledge of how good Exynos 5250 is. Not that good of a sign that its first appearance is in a low volume cloud client.
Sounds like it needs another 6 months to get it into phones.
This news went somewhat under the radar but it's a big one.First chromebook at a reasonable price,first ARM based laptop that will sell more than a few units (if we exclude the convertible tablets) and first A15 product. Btw GigaOm mentiones 660ms in Sunspider,we don't know anything about clocks,RAM and storage speeds but that's quite a number for ARM.
There were the Z-80 personal computers (Sinclair Spectrums), there were Commodores and plenty of others. Not to mention that I've seen Android nettops with physical keyboard but without touchscreen this year in a superstore (I'm not sure about specifications, though, but they had solid-state storage).
It would be half decent if you could actually run Android apps on the platform. Would allow some productivity, entertainment, more games and better offline / poor connection use. Configuration as a thin client (Citrix/RDP/VNC/PCoIP) should be easy and straight forward for corporate use. At this hardware price, with full feature GNU/Linux browser with Flash player it could be a halfway-decent as a light machine for consumers. You miss a lot of entertainment and features by not allowing Android apps though. Why wouldn't I want to sync some of my Spotify playlist to this device and why wouldn't I want to use the Android streaming apps from all the services around which does much more than their Flash Player sites (if they even allow you in with a Chromebook). It's for running web-apps but just connection issues and DRM makes that not such much of a proposition. When already running a Linux kernel it's not even that hard to merge it with Android. It's not enough to just be different to Android here, some wider software support is needed. I would love to have webapps for most stuff so I just log in and continue from where I was but that won't happen in full.
Adding X11 to Android to run Chromium etc and call it Chrome OS would be possible. Could be a great platform for the web, web apps, consuming multimedia etc.
2. The other way to look at is you're getting 100GB of cloud storage included in the price. $250 is a great price for just the hardware. $250 - $120 = $130 for A15, USB 3.0 etc.
3. After 2 years just use whatever cloud storage you already have. Skydrive, dropbox etc. will all work on it just like they do on Windows 8 and iOS devices.
Yes it's just you. Look at their target consumer - a little girl, with hearts on her bottom in her schoolgirl outfit. There it is - the chit chat teeny bopper, where mommie and daddy can drop $249 so kiddie can be cool in school. Then Google of course has all the snoop and sniff and sell data stuff at the ready, and the 100G online storage can help the authorities and any "invesigations" should anything occur, like sharing the wrong camera pics or views. LOL It's whatever - they're too cheap and greedy to allow you to store your own stuff, they want it all, on their data center, and you "deal with it" at CRAP wifi speeds. They take your speed, they take your time, they take your data, they take your security, they take anything and everything personal. It's perfect for the - I don't know what person.
I think the only thing that could stop this thing from being able to run Windows RT is the size of the SSD. Of course, Microsoft isn't selling Windows RT but that doesn't mean it won't be available via "other means." I'm not really interested in Chrome OS but a $250 Windows RT ultrabook sounds pretty nice in my opinion.
Windows 8 is being forced onto every PC anyways. With Windows RT on a device like this it would be the same UI as any other low end laptop. The only difference with Windows RT from the users perspective is requiring all applications to come through the Windows Store.
Most people already owns a PC laptop. Why would one opt for another laptop just for playing? I bet 99% of people will pick a tablet instead. Then later, they will upgrade their laptop to a convertible laptop.
I keep missing the point of this device and others like it. What is wrong with Windows or Linux. Just because a laptop is half a pound lighter or 3 millimeter thinner does not make it any more useful. Every program in the world is written either for Windows OS or a variant of the Linux OS. Why waste all that and just keep your fingers crossed for something similar to show up on Android or Google something? A 10 year old laptop can do more than this device can do. Provided of course that the user is actually doing something useful and not flattering himself for making Google or Samsung of ARM happier than they already are. I would personally just purchase the cheapest laptop available and install the latest Linux OS on it and get done with it. The mileage one gets on that is easily ten time what one gets on this silly piece of hardware.
Yep. I guess this device isn't for me either. I just don't understand why you'd want it. At some point they need to understand that price isn't the only motivator.
If all you do is surf the web, why do you care what else you can do. Having a lightweight machine is great, thinness helps but isn't as important. Also, I'd assume it's pretty responsive considering it's a lightweight OS, running off a SSD...
My wife may actually want one of these... I do too much on my computer to be able to use one (need apps), but alot of people just want web access.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
50 Comments
Back to Article
frostyfiredude - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I've read that it's a 30Wh battery on G+ and Engadget. That 6.5 hour runtime doesn't sound very good to me for a 11.6" ARM device with that size battery. My 11.6" MBA with a SB i5 gets 5 hours off a 35Wh battery while browsing the web for comparison, and that's with a heavier OS at that.coder543 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
If anything, I'd say they're being safe rather than sorry by quoting such a low number. My bet is that this device averages 8 hours minimum...however, if we set my assumptions aside and consider your argument, I will point out that the MBA has four times the budget to put into each component, allowing them to fine tune each component to use as little power as possible, and the battery is LiPo instead of Li-Ion, plus a better quality display panel can draw significantly less power. The same could be said to a lesser extent of WiFi and Bluetooth.
Apple is a master at their craft.
I can't wait for full reviews of this device, and I so wish that I could run Ubuntu for ARM or some other ARM distro on here. We'll see.
Kisper - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Just to clear things up:lithium polymer batteries ARE lithium-ion.
The major difference is that in a traditional Li-ion battery, the electrolyte (a lithium salt) is held within an organic solvent, whereas with a Lithium-ion polymer battery, the electrolyte is held by a polymer.
I agree in principal with your statements. Hopefully you don't construe this to be an attack on you.
teldar - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
According to modern convention, while a lithium polymer battery may indeed be a lithium ion battery, people refer to advanced polymer batteries as polymer and more generic lithium batteries as ion.I appreciate specificity, as it's the only way to preclude misinterpretations, but I would say he used typically accepted wordage.
Leonick - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
Possible. Can't say I know the last time I saw a product where the battery estimates undercut the actual time you get. Apple usually got fairly spot on with their, most other companies exaggerate a lot (or simply don't test under reasonable conditions).Heck if Samsungs phone battery life specs are anything to go by you should be happy if it comes anywhere near those six hours even :p
UpSpin - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
30Wh/6hours = 5W for the Chromebook35Wh/5hours = 7W for the MacBook Air
The display backlight consumes most of the power. Both have the same display resolution, thus equal display backlight, thus their display should consume about the same power. Most of the other internals consume similar power, too. The SSD in the Macbook air idles while web browsing so no real difference here either, the Air has more RAM, but the difference is maybe 0.2W in the end. So 2W more for the SB i5 while idling, sounds reasonable for me.
We also don't know how Google measured the battery life. While idling, web browsing, movie playback, what display brightness?
So better wait for reviews to see make a real comparison.
lowlymarine - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
It's called "race to idle." While the SB i5 in your MacBook Air uses a lot more power under load than a Cortex-A15, it's also leaps and bounds more powerful. Therefore, it gets its work done faster and returns to the all-important idle state sooner, allowing for better battery life in a simple workload like web browsing.Put both machines under continuous load until the batteries died, and I'm sure the ARM notebook would last a fair bit longer. Then again, it would also get less done.
Microsapper - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link
Chromium Browser is being fully optimized for online use on ARM A15. The mainboard design, bandwidth, i/o, power usage, SSD are being optimized for this purpose as well. The SSD powers down and A15 throttles down for online use to save on Mali 605 GPU power usage. While doing general web browsing, we can expect to get much longer power usage and that's what they've been shooting for with this first ARM powered Ultrabook!Charbax goes into additional details on his ARM page, in explaining just how Cloud Computing is set to change our Online Connected World in the Future with Chrome OS:
http://armdevices.net/2012/10/21/how-i-think-that-...
Charbax has been on the cutting edge of ARM computing for years. He was the first to get a look at Samsung's F700 in August September and is mostly the one who leaked photos in early October. He described SGH-Z610 (FCC in August 2006) as the precursor to the Apple iPhone, when it was first shown in January 2006. A whole year before iPhone came out. No doubt he has direct connections inside Samsung. Even Apple was aware of this Multi-media Touchscreen Gesture Based Smartphone w/ it's single round physical Play/Home button on front. In fact they used the processor in iPhone. Anyone smart should pay attention to what he says and there is absolutely no doubt about that! (even though he has toned down his leaks in recent years, he still gets inside info)
Consider this; at $249 the Samsung ARM Chromebook is an excellent deal and no doubt, at this early stage has lots of room to be optimized and you may find some of his claims a little too outrageous. But he's made them before and been right the majority of the time. Right now that future 20 hour usage on this ARM A15 Ultrabook may sound ridiculous, but we haven't seen even half of what ARM and Samsung have put into the Exynos Processor.
Remember too..... that had Samsung a8 Inte gone with ARM's recommendation and dropped Intrinsity inside of deciding to o partner with Apple on Hummingbird share the costs when Intrinsity was in dire financial straits and over the due date, they would have been better off. ARM would be too, because they wanted SAMSUNG to be first to build an all ARM Chip with Mali GPU, Artisan, etc. But wanted energy efficient CPU to go with Imagination GPU for power to run iPad. ARM was having trouble getting any fab or device maker to take a shot on Mali. Low n behold SAMSUNG should have dropped Apple and Intrinsity...... eaten their losses and Gone all ARM then! .......ARM Logic Energy Efficient design Optimizations were every bit as good as Intrinsity's
nerd1 - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
I own a MBA 13" with (claimed) 7-hr battery time and I usually get 4.5hrs. What I do is mostly browsing, yes with flash enabled.amdwilliam1985 - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
Pretty much the same here with my 2011 13" base MBA.I get about 5 hours of browsing with pretty much everything turn off and/or lower.
kenour - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Books are so 20th century, we want boxes! :PThis would be my 'old family member's' computer of choice. Simple, easy, cheap.
coder543 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
why chromebox instead of chromebook for the aforementioned family members? a laptop is all-in-one, so to them it is even simpler, in most cases.kenour - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Because 24" screens are cheap, and old peoples eyes are crap.aryonoco - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
This would be the perfect computer for my parents. They literally don't use anything other than the browser, and are already hooked into the Google ecosystem thanks to Android and Gmail, so this would suit them well.Would be great if you could get your hands on it and do a proper review, especially as this is the first A15 device in the wild!
amdwilliam1985 - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
great idea, I'm also interest in the capability of that A15.Heard it's much more powerful but also more power hungry.
ken.c - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
" the first PC to feature neither Intel nor AMD."Puh-leeze. This fails on all measures. If you mean first PC without x86 overall, well, it's patently NOT (see half the stuff at http://oldcomputers.net). If you mean first Windows PC, oops, it's not a Windows PC. If you mean first… oh hell, you get the idea.
Darn kids, get off my lawn.
Aenean144 - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Yeah. Maybe the author just totally forgot? It's not even the first ARM laptop within the last 3 years, let alone 10 years ago.Zoomer - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
You should have said Ultrabook form factor computing device.Well, except it's not. See transformer.
JasonInofuentes - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Yeah, my fault, I meant in quite some time.Kevin G - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Indeed. Go back 15 years and you can find non-x86 hardware running Windows. I wouldn't classify them as PC's as they were more workstations or servers but they existed. In a similar vein, until recently MS supported a command line version of Windows on Itanium systems.Also around that time Apple has moved to PowerPC from the Motorola 68k line, both radically different architectures than x86. Then again, one could go about calling them Macs instead of PC's.
There is also the Crusoe chip which was non-x86 but ran x86 software by merit of binary translation software and ran Windows.
Flunk - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
You don't even have to look that far back. Anyone recall Apple Powerbooks or iBooks?Aenean144 - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
I guess no one remembers the ARMH promoted "smartbook" category: an ARM powered laptop. I predict doom as long as you can't play games on it. At least we'll have knowledge of how good Exynos 5250 is. Not that good of a sign that its first appearance is in a low volume cloud client.Sounds like it needs another 6 months to get it into phones.
coolhardware - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
I believe they didn't actually forgo 3G this generation, it's just a different model number and costs $329.99 instead of $249...http://www.jdhodges.com/2012/10/dual-core-3g-chrom...
-or-
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/chrome-os-devic...
Looks pretty sweet!
:-)
Zoomer - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Wow, what is this, DT?pixelstuff - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
I would like to know if it will run AirMech or similar high end games from the Chrome store.https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/airmech/...
Mugur - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
What options do we have to install another OS?bupkus - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
DOS?Mugur - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
I would prefer Windows 8 RT, but it's obviously impossible... :-)jjj - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
This news went somewhat under the radar but it's a big one.First chromebook at a reasonable price,first ARM based laptop that will sell more than a few units (if we exclude the convertible tablets) and first A15 product.Btw GigaOm mentiones 660ms in Sunspider,we don't know anything about clocks,RAM and storage speeds but that's quite a number for ARM.
Calin - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
There were the Z-80 personal computers (Sinclair Spectrums), there were Commodores and plenty of others.Not to mention that I've seen Android nettops with physical keyboard but without touchscreen this year in a superstore (I'm not sure about specifications, though, but they had solid-state storage).
bupkus - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
"There were the Z-80 personal computers (Sinclair Spectrums), there were Commodores and plenty of others."But could they play Angry Birds?
boblabola - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Sep9...http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Acorn/PR/A4_Launc...
It could have been much better. A colour screen would have been nice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS
bupkus - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Wow, did I ever get a temporal flashback to undergrad days looking at that pdf.bupkus - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Dependence on wi-fi.Penti - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
It would be half decent if you could actually run Android apps on the platform. Would allow some productivity, entertainment, more games and better offline / poor connection use. Configuration as a thin client (Citrix/RDP/VNC/PCoIP) should be easy and straight forward for corporate use. At this hardware price, with full feature GNU/Linux browser with Flash player it could be a halfway-decent as a light machine for consumers. You miss a lot of entertainment and features by not allowing Android apps though. Why wouldn't I want to sync some of my Spotify playlist to this device and why wouldn't I want to use the Android streaming apps from all the services around which does much more than their Flash Player sites (if they even allow you in with a Chromebook). It's for running web-apps but just connection issues and DRM makes that not such much of a proposition. When already running a Linux kernel it's not even that hard to merge it with Android. It's not enough to just be different to Android here, some wider software support is needed. I would love to have webapps for most stuff so I just log in and continue from where I was but that won't happen in full.Adding X11 to Android to run Chromium etc and call it Chrome OS would be possible. Could be a great platform for the web, web apps, consuming multimedia etc.
Mugur - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
Correct.Penti - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
Sensible comment.HisDivineOrder - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
After the two years, you have to pay $60 per year to keep that 100gb you'll need since the thing is lacking in capacity.Yeah, thanks, but no thanks.
Zink - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
1. Adding a 32GB SD card is $202. The other way to look at is you're getting 100GB of cloud storage included in the price. $250 is a great price for just the hardware.
$250 - $120 = $130 for A15, USB 3.0 etc.
3. After 2 years just use whatever cloud storage you already have. Skydrive, dropbox etc. will all work on it just like they do on Windows 8 and iOS devices.
zappb - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
none of the images show up for me, could be just me (in the gallery)CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 26, 2012 - link
Yes it's just you.Look at their target consumer - a little girl, with hearts on her bottom in her schoolgirl outfit.
There it is - the chit chat teeny bopper, where mommie and daddy can drop $249 so kiddie can be cool in school.
Then Google of course has all the snoop and sniff and sell data stuff at the ready, and the 100G online storage can help the authorities and any "invesigations" should anything occur, like sharing the wrong camera pics or views.
LOL
It's whatever - they're too cheap and greedy to allow you to store your own stuff, they want it all, on their data center, and you "deal with it" at CRAP wifi speeds.
They take your speed, they take your time, they take your data, they take your security, they take anything and everything personal.
It's perfect for the - I don't know what person.
tayb - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
I think the only thing that could stop this thing from being able to run Windows RT is the size of the SSD. Of course, Microsoft isn't selling Windows RT but that doesn't mean it won't be available via "other means." I'm not really interested in Chrome OS but a $250 Windows RT ultrabook sounds pretty nice in my opinion.Arksine - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Lack of touch would severely limit the usability of Windows RT on this device.Zink - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Windows 8 is being forced onto every PC anyways. With Windows RT on a device like this it would be the same UI as any other low end laptop. The only difference with Windows RT from the users perspective is requiring all applications to come through the Windows Store.nofumble62 - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
Most people already owns a PC laptop. Why would one opt for another laptop just for playing? I bet 99% of people will pick a tablet instead. Then later, they will upgrade their laptop to a convertible laptop.versesuvius - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
I keep missing the point of this device and others like it. What is wrong with Windows or Linux. Just because a laptop is half a pound lighter or 3 millimeter thinner does not make it any more useful. Every program in the world is written either for Windows OS or a variant of the Linux OS. Why waste all that and just keep your fingers crossed for something similar to show up on Android or Google something? A 10 year old laptop can do more than this device can do. Provided of course that the user is actually doing something useful and not flattering himself for making Google or Samsung of ARM happier than they already are. I would personally just purchase the cheapest laptop available and install the latest Linux OS on it and get done with it. The mileage one gets on that is easily ten time what one gets on this silly piece of hardware.andrewaggb - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
Yep. I guess this device isn't for me either. I just don't understand why you'd want it. At some point they need to understand that price isn't the only motivator.c4v3man - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
If all you do is surf the web, why do you care what else you can do. Having a lightweight machine is great, thinness helps but isn't as important. Also, I'd assume it's pretty responsive considering it's a lightweight OS, running off a SSD...My wife may actually want one of these... I do too much on my computer to be able to use one (need apps), but alot of people just want web access.
Obsoleet - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
It has apps? http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/webstore/apps...zappb - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
That keyboard looks awesome...and normally the samsung screens are great - nice product