Gadgetory

this is David with the verge and today we're taking a look at the newest version of Google's Chrome OS running on two new Samsung devices a series five Chromebook laptop and a series three chrome box desktop as I mentioned though Chrome OS is the real story here it's been completely revamped and improved in a huge way it actually feels like a real legitimate operating system kind of for the first time everything you do is still in a chrome window but Google made the whole user experience a lot more like Windows or Mac OS there's a much better when doing experience you can open things as tabs or as standalone windows that basically just look like apps so Gmail starts to feel like a native app rather than just another tab in a Chrome window there's also a real desktop now with the wallpaper you can change and a taskbar that looks like a mix between the dock in Mac OS and the windows taskbar and there are quick launch settings on the right side kind of like what you'd get an Android 4.0 the basic paradigm hasn't changed though apps are still websites and everything still happens in a Chrome window it's just managed better now instead of having tons of tabs in a single window you can manage it more like you would native apps it's much faster and more stable now to previous versions had some problems just with basic tasks and now it just works much more fluidly and much better the biggest problem is that there are still some things you just can't do in a web browser Chrome OS doesn't have apps like Skype and even some chat clients or Twitter apps or photo editing apps leave a lot to be desired it's also tough to do things like listen to music in the background if you want to pause your music so you can watch a video you have to switch to the correct tab and pause the music and then go back and it's just a little slower to do a lot of things that you'd normally do with native apps also since apps are still just bookmarks if you click on an icon it won't know that there's already a window open and will actually open another instance and once you have ten different windows of your email open it starts to get a little messy at this point with Chrome OS there's really not a lot you can't do using a browser but a lot of things are still slower and clunkier than having separate native apps that the operating system recognizes as distinct things so next there's the new hardware first there's the samsung series 5 chromebook laptop which hasn't changed much from last year's model it's still light it weighs 3.3 pounds and it's very clean and minimal it's available in a silver color and it's good looking but it's not quite as sleek as the all-black cr-48 or the white and black series 5 from last year it's largely the same hardware but has a few Newports which is nice there are two USB 2.0 ports an SD card slot a headphone jack an Ethernet port and a display port it has a good keyboard with chiclet style keys that feel a little cheap but work relatively well and there are a lot of function keys designed specifically for Chrome OS there are keys specific to searching or switching windows or going back and forth within the browser and it just makes navigating around the OS really easy the trackpad is also really excellent it has two finger scrolling which works really well and it's just much more responsive and smooth than we're used to even from desktop computers the Chromebook has a 12.1 inch 1280 by 800 matte display and since it's matte and not glossy it can actually be used outdoors which is really great the screens not perfect it mutes colors a little bit and washes out when you get off the vertical axis but it works pretty well in general that performs the computers really really solid most of that is due to the OS itself being much better but the new 1.3 gigahertz dual-core Intel Celeron processor and four gigs of ram work well and I never had any performance issues with the Chromebook at all the Chromebook was generally really fast really stable even with intensive games or flash heavy sights it really never broke down boot and resume times are also insanely fast it takes about 6 seconds to turn on and connect to the Internet and two seconds to resume from sleep which is just crazy the Chromebook also gets really great battery life you'll get a solid full day of use out of it seven or eight hours and we got consistently above that on our battery tests the device starts at $449 but for 549 you can get one with a Verizon radio inside and it actually comes with a hundred megabytes of free data per month then there's the chrome box it's kind of like the Mac Mini and it's basically a bunch of ports plus Chrome OS it has six USB ports to display ports an Ethernet port DVI and a headphone jack google says it can power screens up to 30 inches but it worked well on big TVs that we tested as well it has the same performance as a Chromebook it works really well it's really stable has 4 gigs of RAM plus a 1.9 gigahertz dual-core Intel processor and caus'd just again no problems in our test but that's largely due to Chrome OS being far better than it was so in all this is a huge leap forward for Chrome OS it's some of the best hardware we've seen yet and the operating system is far more stable and far more useful than ever before the problem is that I'm not sure we're ready for an operating system and a computer that live completely online and until Google is able to really make offline access work well I'm not sure anyone will be at $329 for the chromebox and for 49 for the Chromebook you can easily buy a tablet or even a cheap Windows computer and you'd still have a more versatile and more useful device in all situations Chrome OS is definitely on its way but I'm not sure it's there yet