Cr48

Was allowed to play with the Cr48 laptop last night.  It was quite interesting.  For the geeky types, it makes for a nice instant-on-I-just-have-to-check-a-web-page tool but it's impossible to do anything that isn't available via a web page.  I probably like it because I've spent the last year slapping web front-ends on everything from IRC to ESXi VM controls.

The guy that had brought the laptop in, to show it off, said it best: "The techies will hate it but the non-techies will absolutely love it."  All in all, if it sells for about $150, Google will eat both Microsoft's and Apple's lunch for the year or so that it takes them to catch up.  If it sells for about $300, I don't think it'll go far (for an extra $100, you can have acquire a full-featured, albeit cheap quality, laptop).

I managed to get it to log into the OpenVPN-ALS management page but didn't have enough time to get to access the internal wiki or any other service at the house.  I get the impression that it's running OpenJDK, 'cause it generated the same errors as OpenVPN-ALS-on-OpenJDK.

Someone else was able to play a Pogo game on it.  If it is OpenJDK, it's a quite recent one.

It is able to play YouTube videos so it has Flash.  However, at 480 resolution, it just jerky enough to be noticeable (skips a frame every now and then).  This could have been caused by the wireless bandwidth which was being shared with a half-dozen other laptops.  (Anyone else get this impression?).

No one thought to click on the Market icon to see what was available.  Next time maybe.

Overall, I think it'll make a good "cloud" interface for people who primarily surf the web, blog, and/or use Google apps.