New Samsung Chromebook & Chromebox review: Chrome OS grows up

Apps open in one of four ways: as a regular tab in the current window, as a pinned tab, as a full-screen chromeless window, or as a normal-sized chromeless window. The latter two are the important new additions: they let you open web apps that feel like native apps, with no address bar or browser toolbars. On my Mac, I typically run anywhere from four to ten Fluid instances at once — so I can quickly switch to my Gmail without thumbing through a dozen tabs, for instance. With Chrome OS, I can just right-click on the app's icon and select "open as window" to achieve the exact same effect.

You move between windows using Alt-Tab, or using the function key with three overlapping squares on it. It's a quick way to move between a couple of windows, but it breaks down if you have a lot of them open — you can only scroll forward or backward, so if you have 13 windows open you'll have to flip through all of them in order to find the one you want. A feature like Expose, which lets you see all your windows at once, would be hugely helpful here.

The Chromebook also doesn't seem to know it has a windowing system yet. The taskbar is a nice system and a clever way to access apps, but if you click on the Gmail icon when you already have a Gmail window open, it just launches another Gmail window rather than taking you to the already-open instance.

I was constantly reminded that Chrome OS "apps" are really still bookmarks, without some of the intelligence required for them to really run as native apps. When I have Rdio playing and want to watch a YouTube video, normally I just press the Play / Pause button and my Mac will pause Rdio. With Chrome OS I have to flip through my windows until I find the one with the Rdio tab open, click over to the right tab, pause Rdio, then go back to YouTube and play the video. Then, I have to go back to Rdio when the video's done and start my music playing again. If you're listening to local music files, there's a small persistent player in the bottom right corner, but isn't the whole point of the OS that you'll do things like listen to music online?

APPS

The Chrome Web Store never really made sense to me in a desktop environment, but it's incredibly important to the usefulness of Chrome OS. I mostly downloaded apps-as-bookmarks, which provide quick access to Rdio, or Gmail, or Evernote; those apps are the easiest way to get the Fluid-like apps installed. A handful of shortcuts to Google services come preinstalled, like Docs and YouTube, but there's an app for almost any website you'd want to visit.

Then there are apps like Google Mail Checker, which add key functionality (in this case, desktop email notifications) to Chrome OS. There are a lot of these utilities, which add little bits of usefulness to the browser or help you do more without constantly switching windows, but they can be really hard to find. The signal to noise ratio in the Chrome Web Store skews heavily toward noise, and it's often hard to figure out what an app does or whether or not it's any good.

Printing is possible thanks to the Google Cloud Print Utility, though you'll need one of a handful of "Cloud Ready" printers to make it work. Anyway, I can't really imagine that you have significant printing needs if you're willing to spend all your time in a browser window.

Offline files

Chrome OS is designed to be a totally online operating system, but Google does make a few concessions to the notion that you still have some files stored locally. There's a stripped-down file manager and media player; both work well without much in the way of frills. Downloaded files are stored in a "Downloads" folder, and every drive you plug in shows up as its own folder. You can manage files pretty easily, though I'd rather just search — it's a shame that there's no way to search through a local drive, but apparently that's just one more inducement to upload everything to Google Drive.

Speaking of Drive, Google's working on implementing it into Chrome OS in a big way. The next version of Chrome OS, coming in just a few weeks, will have full Drive integration into the file manager so you'll be able to manage everything from one spot no matter what drive it lives on. The feature is actually available in the Dev channel of Chrome OS, and it works impressively well — though are there some definite bugs with the new version. The biggest advantage of Drive integration is that everything's in one place — your online files, local documents, and external drives are all accessible in the File Manager. You can also quickly copy things from local storage to Google Drive, which is handy.

There's not much you can do with your Drive files offline except look at them, at least for now. The Docs team is also in the final stages of a seamless offline mode for Google Docs, which would be huge: offline support is currently the Achilles' heel of the Chromebook, since there's really not much you can get done without an internet connection. Offline Docs support and Drive integration would make the Chromebook a much more useful work companion.

A few apps currently work offline — signified by a lightning bolt underneath their listing in the Chrome Web Store — but they're mostly games or Google apps. Performance didn't seem to change whether I was online or off, though, which was a nice surprise.

TYPEKIT

One of the most surprising things I noticed using Chrome OS was how many websites use font supplier Typekit to provide beautiful typography. We use it heavily here at The Verge, and a huge number of the sites I visit every day use it too. I know this because Chrome OS didn't support Typekit, and a lot of sites I visit looked, well, terrible because of it. We told Google reps about the problem, and the company quickly whitelisted the OS for Typekit, so if you're reading this on a Chromebook it should look as good as it does everywhere else. The fix requires publishers to republish Typekit onto their site, so the typographical experience is still a little hit-or-miss, but the internet should be beautiful again soon.

Since the operating system is so light and the Chromebook runs on a 16GB SSD, boot and resume times are absolutely insane. The Chromebook goes from completely off to connected to Wi-Fi in about six seconds (plus the time it takes to enter your Google password), and will resume from sleep in two seconds flat. The latter continually amazed me: I'd open the computer up, and like magic my music would instantly start playing and my windows would be right there as if the computer had never gone to sleep.

A light OS also makes for long battery life, as does the Celeron processor, an ultra-low power Sandy Bridge chip. As I've mentioned before, I used the Chromebook heavily, and I consistently got about seven hours of use before the battery died. On the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and high-res images with the screen brightness at 65 percent, it lasted seven hours and 10 minutes; that's a very good score, and given that the whole Chrome OS experience is about loading websites, it's an excellent indication of real-world use. It's not quite up to Google's promises of all-day battery life, though.

The Chromebook starts at $449, but for $549 you can get a Verizon Wireless radio built into the device, plus 100MB of free data a month. You'll burn through 100MB in a hurry, and it's only a 3G connection, but it's a pretty handy thing to have in a pinch. You connect to Verizon like you would any other Wi-Fi network; there's a brief setup period the first time you connect, and you're forced to set up an account, but every time after it's pretty seamless. You're prompted to get more data when you're about to run out, and if you're in need of a quick connection you can get 24 hours of unlimited data for $9.99, which is really handy in a pinch.

Powered by a 1.9GHz Intel Celeron B840 processor and 4GB of RAM, the Chromebox performs remarkably well, though that's something of a theme in the new round of Chromebooks — the hardware was previously unable to keep up and the OS itself had some issues, but things are much more fluid now. It boots in about six seconds, and you'll be online in under ten; it took me a little longer than that, only because my Google password is long and complicated.

The Chromebox’s general performance mirrors the Chromebook. It’s very fast and very stable, and I never encountered a crash or slowdown except when I specifically engineered the situation to work a computer as hard as possible, in a use case you’ll likely never encounter. Flash sites work well, games are fluid, and I never once had a tab or window crash.

Since your mouse and keyboard are going to come from somewhere other than Google, you're not going to get all the Chrome-friendly tricks and keys. Most are still mapped the same — you just have to remember that the Windows key opens a new tab, and F5 switches between open windows. The one that's not mappable is Caps Lock — try as I might, I was never able to get Caps Lock to become the Search button, which adds a couple of steps to every query. Likewise, the shortcut to open the apps list never mapped itself, so I always had to click on the nine-squared icon. Where the Chromebook feels like a cohesive piece where software and hardware were made for one another, the Chromebox feels more hacked together.

Google or Samsung could of course fix this problem by releasing an external keyboard and mouse combo for the Chromebox, and the manual actually alludes to the existence of that combo, but the additional expense could be hard to justify when you probably have a mouse and keyboard lying around your house.