Since a mystery box arrived on that magical day in November I've been plugging away with the Cr-48, trying to fit it into my computing life. Last semester I scanned all my textbooks and loaded them onto an iPad, keeping my trusty MacBook at home and taking notes by hand. There is something different about taking handwritten notes, but that's a story for another day. Anyway, with the MacBook retired to desktop life, aside from a few occasions, I decided to carry another device with me in my treks to the city and the law school/library: the stealth Google Chrome laptop.
I have not made up my mind about typing notes in class, I probably won't, but when I type them up later on, it will be on the Cr-48. Probably right into Google Docs, but maybe Evernote, though the latter is more limited in terms of formatting (random thought: wouldn't it be great if Google, Evernote and Dropbox all interfaced with the same bucket of data?).
Why go back to carrying a laptop again you might ask? First, I want to do my best in testing this thing for Google and using it more will lead to more bugs (in theory) and a wider variety of test cases. Second it's smaller and lighter than a 3 year old Mac (and has only an SSD – my frankensteined laptop now had an SSD boot drive and a large magnetic drive in place of the DVD).
The only thing that really bugs me about the Cr-48 is the trackpad. After begin spoiled by Apple, it's tough to go back to a barebones piece of hardware. Since the Cr-48 is not final hardware I don't hold this against Google or anyone else. The hardware exists to provide an outlet for Chrome to run, no more, no less. And it's surprisingly speedy for most tasks not requiring Flash.