Submission + - Hands-on With Google's Cr-48
adeelarshad82 writes: While Google has made it clear that Cr-48 is nothing more than a test prototype, it was interesting to see the machine Google went with to test Chrome OS. Out of the box, the Cr-48 conjures images of the Black Apple MacBook, from the plain, rubberized chassis to what looks like the same chiclet-style keyboard. Based on anecdotal tests, seems like the machine is running on an Intel Atom processor. The 12-inch notebook weighs about 3.8lbs and comes with a clickpad which recognizes one finger as a left click, while a two-finger tap triggers a right-click function. The laptop obviously contains a hard drive for storing backup data, but the capacity is unknown. The notebook comes with a lone USB port on the right side which has limited functionalities. For now thumb drives, hard drives, cameras, printers and other USB peripheral do not work with Cr-48. Google is working on getting its Chrome OS to recognize storage drives, but it's a work in progress. Once Chrome OS does recognize storage drives, users can probably install other OSes on Cr-48 for fun. Since the machine doesn't have any ethernet ports, surfing the web is only possible with one of two wireless connections. Finally the video playback seems to struggle with Hulu videos where as YouTube clips were okay. Despite using a 1,280-by-800 resolution, which means the Cr-48 can theoretically support 720p video playback; all the videos were capped at 480p. Clearly, these are early times for Chrome OS and seems like Google is eager to get the OS out in the testing environment and improve on what they currently have.
