Yesterday I picked up my Chromebook from Pensar IT on Gloucester Place. I had always liked the idea of this machine but the reviews had been crap and the leap seemed dangerous.
I’d love you to think I was some cutting edge early adopter, the reality is that I just don’t have the budget for a Mac Air – and I’d would get a good kick in from my accountant and Super Cool Wife if I showed up with one.
So far this machine is amazing, I only really use the web so why do I need all that other crap?
It took me less than 15 minutes to work everything out, it does feel a bit weird ONLY having Google Chrome, where is all the other stuff I see – but never use?
It is worth saying that if your industry is financial modelling this probably is not the machine for you. Maybe you could log into Office 365 and everything would work but I am not qualified to make that claim.
However, if you live on-line (and you probably do) this is all you need. After you have got over you don’t open that excel spreadsheet (that is really only a list anyway) in Office you are fine.
In fact it is more than fine it is 50 zillion times more easy, the only place to save things is google drive which all syncs so now all my devices really are synced, not nearly synced. Oddly because you access dropbox via the web app it is even faster and easier to use, I moved most of what was in dropbox to the google drive so “downsized” as a result.
The first real big test will be when I need to do a presentation with slides, I rarely use slides these days but it is one of those things that everyone either does in PPT, keynote or PDF.
I am going to stop there as there will be more to report and as well as singing the praises I want to be honest about the drawbacks too.
Before I go two quick things, one the key board is great – not quite as slick as a Mac but well on the way!
Two – this is an easy transition for me as I have been committed to Google Apps, working on the web and being mobile for well over three years now, if you still only think that google is for searching and Outlook is for social media and email you might get hurt.
More later!
