The Samsung Series 5 is the first ever Chromebook, featuring a 12.1 inch screen and an Atom N570 dual core processor. In many ways, this is the first ever true netbook, because going on the Internet is pretty much all it can do.
Initial reviews of the Series 5 have been mixed, although I think it is fair to say that most people are pretty unimpressed. While there is nothing wrong with the “browser in a box” philosophy per se, I think most of us were expecting a much smaller and lighter box for a computer that can basically only run a browser.
The Samsung Series 5 netbook features 2GB of RAM, a 16GB solid state drive, a couple of USB ports, a VGA dongle, a SIM card slot, an SD card reader, and a standard mic/headset port. This is pretty much as basic as it gets, and there is no HDMI, no Ethernet, and no Bluetooth to spice things up.
However, Google are talking up the user experience of this netbook more than the spec sheet, and it is here where this computer has a chance to redeem itself. Google are promising a very fast boot time, with the netbook said to be ready in under 12 seconds. The battery is also being reported to go for at least 8 hours, and the entire file system is encrypted to avoid virus infections.
The Chrome browser lies at the heart of the Series 5 Chromebook, although Google have thrown in a basic file browser and media player. However, basic functionality like listening to music is all dependent on the browser, the cloud, and a WiFi connection, because you can’t store much on the small internal flash memory.
As many analysts have been predicting and many reviewers are now saying, these Chromebooks feel a little like an experiment. Users are simply not used to living entirely on the Internet, and depend on their desktop for a variety of things. While the first ever commercial “Internet OS” netbook may be a great item in computing museums in years to come, this first Chromebook appears to make much less sense as a practical option in 2011.
If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.
So that got us thinking...what if we helped people experience the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience? Imagine turning on the TV and getting all the channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day — including your favorite video, music and photo sites. We’re excited to announce that we’ve done just that.
Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.
Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.
Because Google TV is built on open platforms like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do. In our announcement today at Google I/O, we challenged web developers to start coming up with the next great web and Android apps designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV today. Soon after launch, we’ll release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV so that developers can build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market. We've already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies — like Jinni.com and Rovi — at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology. Jinni.com is a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV across all sources of premium content available to the user. Rovi is one of the world's leading guide applications. We’re looking forward to seeing all of the ways developers will use this new platform.
We’re working together with Sony and Logitech to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available at Best Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.
This is an incredibly exciting time — for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We're excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too.
*Nielsen, Three Screen Report, Fourth Quarter 2009
Update 2:26PM: Updated to include more information about other developers.
Posted by Salahuddin Choudhary, Google TV Product Manager
Judging by this screenshot taken by an IE6 user who was watching some videos on YouTube, it appears the Google company will be phasing out support for the browser shortly. I don’t have Internet Explorer 6 installed on my computer, so I can’t verify this first hand, but illogical it seems not and a simple Twitter search shows multiple people confirming the news. Heck, some are even downright ecstatic over the news.
The online video behemoth is pointing to ‘modern’ browsers like Google Chrome (twice on the same page even, unsurprisingly), Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 as alternatives.
With the impending move, YouTube follows in the footsteps of that other Web 2.0 poster child, Digg, which recently hinted at wanting to cut support for the browser too. Digg’s User Experience Architect Mark Trammell at the time wrote that the site is strongly considering removing essential features like digging and commenting for IE6 users. He explained that while IE6 users make up around 5% of site traffic, it only accounts for 1% of diggs, buries, and comments.
YouTube so far hasn’t officially communicated about the desire to drop support for IE6, but it’s conceivable that like Digg it would rather have its developers spend time optimizing the service for newer, better browsers than wasting man hours on the oft-despised Microsoft browser. We recently reported that Internet Explorer is losing market share to Firefox and Safari at a rapid pace.
Over the last weeks, I've been working a lot with all three of the major Web browsers, and I've come to some conclusions. This isn't a review as such, it's just what I, as a user, who never has less than three browser windows and several dozens tabs open at a time, have experienced.
Now, many times when you read about reviews with benchmarks the differences, in real life, aren't really visible. That's not the case with Chrome vs. its rivals. If this was a NASCAR race, it would be beating them to the checkered flag by laps.
Chrome was also the only browser that wasn't cracked in seconds or minutes in the recent PWN2OWN hacker competition. In fact, Chrome never was busted.
So, why isn't Chrome my number one? Well, for one thing, it's Windows only, and I'm not a Windows-only kind of computer user. Linux is my main desktop, and I also use Macs a fair amount. What I want is a browser that will work on all three of the main desktop platforms.
Internet Explorer 8. I know many of you won't believe this, but I actually rather liked Internet Explorer 8, when I first started using it. I especially liked that I opened one tab from a link in another, the 'related' tabs have the same color. By automatically organizing the tabs by color-coding, I found that managing tabs was instantly much easier.
Since then, though, I've been hearing from people who have had IE-specific applications -- oh the irony! -- break on them. Since the only point for many people to run IE at all was so that they could use those backwards Web sites, there goes one big reason to use IE right there. By the way, ready or not, Microsoft is about to start offering IE 8 to users via Windows update. If you really use IE a lot, I'm inclined to say 'skip it' for now until they have some of the compatibility bugs beaten out of it.
Firefox 3.5 beta/Firefox 3.08. So, I'm back to Firefox for my best overall browser. It works reasonably fast, it's reasonably secure, and it will work with pretty much any site on the Web. Besides running on every desktop around, Firefox has one other big advantage over the others: its software ecosystem.
So, while Chrome is faster and more secure and IE 8 is vastly improved over IE 7 and 6, the bottom line is that Firefox and its friends still give me a better over-all Web experience. And, when you're like me and you need to find information quickly on the Web all day long, that's no small thing.
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All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
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