The Chromebook at work (gallery)

Google is pushing the Chromebook and manufacturers has responded by reducing prices in order to compete with Apple's iPad. Should you let the new price tempt you into getting one? Check out the review.

Above: Chromebook-closed: A Chromebook, in this case, the Samsung Series 5, is a small, light laptop.

Chromebook-open: Open, the Samsung Chromebook has a surprising large keyboard. It also has a
nice screen, for the device's overall size, and a built-in Webcam.
 

Chromebook: After turning it on, a process that takes about ten-seconds once it knows which Wi-Fi
AP you expect it to use, it will bring you to your default Web home page. In my case, that's iGoogle,
but it can be anything you want. The thing to keep in mind is that the Chromebook is 99% Web-based.
The default interface is the Chrome Web browser.

ChromeBookApps: If you don't set up a site for your Web page, you'll open to one of two tabs. This
is the Chrome OS Web Apps page. This is also the page you'll see when you open up a new blank tab.

ChromeBookPages: The other new tab default is a look at the sites you open most often. You flip
back and forth between your Web pages and applications by clicking on the options at the page's
bottom.

ChromeMusic: Each cloud-based application, in this case, Google Music, gets its own full window.

Chromfilesystem: While ChromeOS is designed so that you'll spend most of your time on the Web,
you can save and use files on a Chromebook's built-in solid-state drive.

ChromeDoc: The bad news is that you can't do everything you'd want with local files. For example,
if you try to open a Word document file from the file manager, instead of launching it in Google Docs,
you get a message telling you to upload it to Google Docs. That's not terribly helpful.

ChromeGraphics: Google is slowly fixing this though. For example, ChromeOS will both display
a PNG graphics file and give you a choice of opening it with the Google's online photo editing and
managing program Picasa. Now, if only ChromeOS would do that with all commonly used file types.