The Chromebook 2012 REAL Innovation

The Acer Chromebook and Chromebooks/Chrome OS in general takes the outdated concept of having a full-featured dedicated operating system like Windows or OSX on your local computer and replaces that functionality utilizing their massive server farms. What did it for me when when I lost an online auction due to a Windows security update that started as I was trying to get my bid in. This should not happen. You just want your browser to work without disruptions at the most critical times.

Thankfully, Google and provided us with a modern desktop OS that does everything I need it to do. You get functioning USB ports that recognize wired or wireless mice (i'm using a Logitech wireless mouse), or flash drives or external hard drives. You get a built-in file manager that recognizes Chrome supported file types. This means that you also have a built-in media player with a picture viewer for jpegs, audio player support for mp3's and video player support with WebM. I am using a 16gb SD card for additional storage or file transfers and a WD 1tb passport portable hard drive as my main storage for content. All of my photos already work with the media player and the same goes for all of my music. For video, you would think that H264 would work, but the Chromebook while recognizing the file type, does not actually play the mp4 file. However, WebM (Google's codec), works flawlessly. In fact, I compared all of my H264 videos with all of my WebM videos and the WebM videos played back flawlessly on both the Chromebook and Windows 7 PC, but the H264 videos had very minor playback issues like ever-slight shading or discoloration and syncing of audio or an occasional stutter. But these issues are very slight and don't really affect the enjoyment of the content. Even so, the quality of WebM is unsurpassed, so I have have been converting all of my video content from WMV, H264, and DVD to WebM. I am using software from Bigasoft to perform the conversions and I highly recommend this software. It works really really well.

For MS Office functionality, I am using a combination of a Chrome app called Live Documents and Microsoft Live which allow you to edit Word, Power Point and Excel documents. Of course Google Docs is another option. I also use a Chrome calculator app for quick calculations and Scratchpad app for quick notes.

Netflix: With full streaming support coming to Chromebooks after only three and a half weeks after launch, this was a priority for both Google and Netflix. Initially, you saw a popup stating that streaming would be coming in a few months and they were working with Google to support it. Nice job. The update also saw a 50% increase in performance with faster page loads and rendering in the browser.

Hulu: The full free browser version of Hulu was available from day one. I don't know why I was surprised at this (Google TV?) This is why the Acer kills the Samsung. With the HDMI port, you can stream free Hulu content to your TV.

Obviously, all of the Google services work great like Gmail, Google Music, calendar and contacts. Google Talk for video chat. I use other Chrome apps like Tweetdeck, Kindle, Google Books, Graphicly and Marvel for digital comics, Amazon Cloud Player, You Tube and of course Angry Birds from the Chrome Web store.

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