chromebook on the road

I’ve been testing out a Chromebook at home for a while now.  Friday was the first time I took it “on the road.”  In other words outside my apartment.

Connecting to 3g

At times, 3G connectivity takes a bit longer to start up.  (This probably happens at home too periodically; I just don’t watch startup there.)  Waiting seems to solve it.  Once I had to force it to reconnect by turning off the 3G and then turning it back on.  I also had to click the X to close the message that 3G wasn’t available.

The keyboard

At home, I’ve been using an external keyboard and mouse when doing anything non-trivial.  On the road, I realized I didn’t remember a keyboard shortcut:  alt up/down is paging.

Overall experience

The Chomebook was easy to use.  I was able to:

  1. Check email
  2. Check a website
  3.  Open a word doc
  4. Post on coderanch
  5. Check the address of a restaurant.
On a cell phone you get a dropped call every so often.  On the chromebook, this manifests as a few seconds loss of connectivity.  This happened to be twice. On a google site, you get a nice message that “the application is unreachable.”   On a non-google site, you get a long message about the dns entry not being available.  While this is true, it seems like a scary message for the lay-person.  The solution is to refresh the browser page in either case.
Bandwidth usage
I used the internet for about an hour total on Friday and went through only 4MB.  Granted I didn’t do anything bandwidth heavy, but I still expected it to be higher.

One thought on “chromebook on the road

  1. Pingback: chromebook recovery disk and external monitor | Down Home Country Coding With Scott Selikoff and Jeanne Boyarsky

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