I used the new Chromebook for a bit over six hours yesterday and it's very nice. The screen is nice and bright and sharp. The keyboard is good. The battery life is excellent. It was still showing more than 50% battery left after 6+ hours of use. It doesn't get too hot. Maybe 95 degrees at the most on the left-hand side when I was really pushing it hard with videos playing, but most of the time it felt like the ambient room temp.
The trackpad is good but has an odd quirk. You use a two-finger tap to right-click and I was updating my list of bookmarks, removing old ones that I no longer use, and you remove them by right-clicking on them to bring up a menu. I did the first three or four with no trouble, then the two-finger tap was launching the websites instead of bringing up the menu letting me delete them. It turns out my fingers had drifted to the edge of the trackpad and the trackpad doesn't recognize the two-finger touch if you get too close to the edge. I don't know why, but it doesn't. When I moved my fingers in just a bit, it worked again. Go figure. It recognizes either finger independently at the edges, but not the two-finger tap.
Other than that minor quirk, all's good. The keyboard is fine. I'm used to typing on my Microsoft Natural keyboard with the split, angled keys, so there's an adjustment when I move to the more conventional layout of the Chromebook keyboard. It's a smaller keyboard than the Natural one but oddly feels bigger. I sometimes tend to land between keys instead of on keys despite them being closer together than on the Natural keyboard.
The screen is a very good one. I was sitting eight feet in front of my 55" 4K HDTV and had the same YouTube video playing on both and the image on the Chromebook was as good as, if not better than the 4K image from 8' away. With the relative closeness of the laptop the apparent image was even bigger on the laptop.
The speakers are good. I have all of my music on the Google Cloud and the Google Play Music app lets me listen to them with no trouble. Are they the best speakers I've ever heard? No, but they're fine. It's got Bluetooth which should let me pair my Bluetooth earbuds to it, but I haven't tried that just yet. (Someone, me, forgot to charge the earbuds.)
I played with it in tablet mode and it's a very, very big and heavy tablet. It's usable, but not overly comfy. I did use one of the drawing apps in tablet mode and that was very nicely handled using the new stylus. I suspect I'll reserve tablet mode for drawing and stuff like that. That's pretty much what I'd planned anyway. It's nice having the keyboard out of the way when you're drawing.
Bookmarks transitioned over from my desktop with no issues. (Other than the fact that I hadn't updated them recently and had some old ones that needed deleting.) I got Grammarly installed and working fine. My Word files popped up from OneDrive with no trouble. My Prime Photos showed up with no trouble. The same with Google photos. Outlook opened with no trouble and my email was all there.
The version of Word on the Chromebook is okay, but not what I'm used to. I'll be mostly writing on my desktop because of that, but it's usable. The formatting got a little screwy though. I use a Kindle plug-in on the desktop version of Word that's not available (or I haven't found it anyway) on the Chromebook version. That Kindle plug-in lets you use drop letters to start a new chapter, but when I look at the same file on the Chromebook the drop letter is sitting all by itself with the rest of the text under it.
All in all, I'm very happy with it. It gives me portability. The weight isn't an issue other than in tablet mode. I can pretty much forget it's on my lap. It weighs less than half of my lighter cat (Callie who's about eleven pounds) and maybe a third of my heavier cat (Lizzie, 17 lbs.) and it doesn't claw, knead me, or beg to be pet as it's lying there. It just lies there. (Bear in mind I used to hold my old 95-pound German shepherd on my lap for hours at a time, so anything feels light in comparison.) The touchscreen works well. I have to be a tick more forceful with it than on my Fire tablet, but it works. It works very, very well with the stylus. By the way, the Meko styluses (styli?) I bought have a clear disc interface which lets you see exactly where things are being drawn. I really like that.
No major issues, a few minor quirks, as is to be expected with new tech, but all in all, I'm very happy with it. It was a good $329 investment. In a perfect world it would weigh less, but it's not all that heavy and I can remember back when portable computers were the size of suitcases and weighed about as much as a fully packed suitcase. This weighs less than five pounds, so it's not bad.
I'd assumed I could just use a photo from Google Photos for my wallpaper, but it turns out you have to download it to the device to use it. Not a big deal. I downloaded a few of my favorite wallpapers from Google photos and they're now on the Chromebook. The camera is okay but nothing special but I don't intend to use it anyway, so that was no big deal. I'm happy with the new Chromebook. It's a pretty neat little gadget and gives me a backup computer to my desktop.
Fly!!! Eagles!!! Fly!!!
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