Today was a day of anticipation waiting on the CR-48 to arrive. I've never been one to be anxious, and for that I am thankful, because I was able to find many things to keep me occupied while I waited on it to show up. No matter what I was doing, I still found myself refreshing the UPS tracking page about once every 10 minutes. Even once I got to work around 2:30, I instantly put the link to the tracking page on my computer and checked it habitually throughout the day.
Sure enough, the last time I checked it before lunch time, it said delivered. I felt the same anticipation akin to that of Christmas morning as I picked up the phone to call my wife and asked her if she was home. Sure enough, she was and had already put it inside. The last thing I wanted was to get home, open the box and find the computers LCD frozen solid. That would be bad.
The thing I was the most grateful for was when she said she hadn't opened it. I am one of those people who LOVES the unboxing moment, like I'm sure a lot of you gadget-heads out there understand.
When I got home close to 1 am, I managed to change into comfy clothes, let the dog out, go to the bathroom, hang up my clothes and jacket all before tearing into the box and being astonished by many things. (I totally would have taken pictures or a video or something, but my phone was completely dead and wouldn't let me, and at that point, the excitement took over and it was open in the blink of an eye.)
Anyways, the things that astonished me were:
1) How thin and light this thing is. It really is a netbook with a big screen.
2) How bright and clear the screen is. Really pleased with the screen.
3) The texture of it. It's a rubberish kind of plastic. Very very cool.
4) How quiet it is. Almost totally silent.
5) The speakers are WAY better than I thought they would be. The slick, integrated Grooveshark app helps me test that :-)
6) The speediness of the internet overall, app installs, and the fluid integration of all of it together. Feels just like the Chrome I'm used to (a very, very good thing).
There's a ton of cool stuff about this thing. Probably the coolest thing is that I'm one of the first thousand or so in the entire world to give this a go. Also the fact that the next revolution in computing might be sitting on my lap.
Any negatives? Yeah, a couple, but nothing huge.
I'm quite used to the Mac multi-touch, so the fact that I can't do my normal leave-one-finger-on-the-trackpad-and-click-with-it-while-scrolling-with-the-other thing is kind of a bummer, but "tap to click" is enabled by default. Werd.
Yes, I realize this is a free netbook but the webcam is kind of junky. Yet to see if it's good enough for gchat or not. I'm sure it is.
So the biggest question is going to be which am I going to use more: iPad or CR-48? That is yet to be determined. I know it won't make my wife too happy if my Christmas present and new love is quickly thrown to the curb from a freebie netbook. Can't see that happening quite yet, but only time will tell.
I guess the biggest thing I worry about is the "big-brotherness" of all of it. Is someone from Google reading these words right now, even before I post this? I doubt it. I have faith in them that even if they can read this before I post it (and any of the stuff I don't put out there for the world to see) that they'll use it for good and not evil. I guess there's another thing where only time can tell.
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