Welp, I Ordered Me a Chromebook

A surprisingly hard act to follow!

Some personal history: although I've traditionally written a goodly portion of first drafts by hand (speaking primarily of fiction here), once I get the ball rolling it's nice to have the speed of a keyboard--not to mention it's nice not to have to do quite as much double work, reentering all the text.

On the other hand, I have the attention span of a gnat, and a fully capable large screened computer offers many distractions. Also, having my text all spread out on a big screen a) makes it feel like I'm filling a water tower one drop at a time and b) makes me inclined to endless editing, since I can scan back through bunches of text at once and find fault with it. I compose most of my blog posts in a small Notepad window on my big screen, but that's not really practical for longer work.

Several years back, I discovered and fell in love with Renaissance Learning's Alphasmart word processors, specifically the Neo. They were rugged, their battery life could be measured in months or even years, they displayed just a few lines of text at a time, and they had a great keyboard. Basically, they were a miniature portable typewriter that saved to memory instead of paper. They only did one thing, but they did it well. I've loved mine. However, there are a few caveats: first of all, getting text from the device to the computer can be fairly time consuming and requires cables. I loathe cables. I lose cables. Secondly, the thing looks like a business class Speak and Spell. I never got truly comfortable with using it out in the public eye.

For some time, I've been longing for an Alphasmart successor: a simple, highly portable, unpretentious device which would allow me to create documents and sync them wirelessly.

I briefly owned a lipstick pink Samsung netbook and still remember it with fondness--I wrote a ridiculous number of short stories on that thing--but it was so slow, especially when booting up, and backing up my documents or syncing the between computers took a bit of thought. It was close, but no cigar.

A few years ago, Chromebooks began to pop up. I was mildly intrigued. Google has been a friend of mine since the days of invite-only G-mail and I already had quite a few documents in the Google eco-system. However, at the time, Chromebooks didn't really have any off-line capability (though I'm usually connected, I'd like that now and again), and were almost a public beta. I liked the concept, but didn't feel like they were ready for prime time.

The current crop feels a lot more polished to me, and I've decided to take the leap. I ordered an Asus Flip C100. This device is part tablet as well as part mini-laptop. The keyboard is small, but actually a bit bigger than the netbook of old, so I'm not too worried. It only has a 10.1 inch screen (tablet sized), but it's a nice bright IPS panel, and although 1200x800 is low for a tablet, it's better than the old netbook. I think it'll be very comfortable.

On top of all that, it has a touch screen, and if you flip the keyboard back, you can use it as a tablet. Granted, Chrome OS isn't really optimized for touch right now, and the screen is no iPad Retina thing, but my primary use case would be browsing or looking at PDFs, and I think it will be just fine for that.

You can also stand it up tent style, or flip the keyboard back far enough to use as a stand for watching movies (Netflix and Amazon Prime should both work) or displaying recipes. That covers just about everything I'd like to be able to do with a small portable device. Document editing comes above all, but I've never owned a tablet and, while I'm not expecting anything like iPad performance, I'm intrigued by the possibilities.

It should be here sometime in the next week. More thoughts once I've had a chance to incorporate it into my workflow. It could be the perfect first draft machine--if I can avoid the siren call of other Chrome tabs. The little guy only weighs about two pounds and will fit easily in my writing bag for coffee shop trips and lunch breaks. Best of all, whatever I type will instantly be available from my other computers.

A bonus: this is childish, but I've always kind of wanted to put stickers all over a computer, but have never had one I felt I could decorate like that. I am *so* gonna sticker this little thing once the brand new wears off.

Anyway, I'm tentatively excited.

Writing in the pink

Well, I did it. I bought a little netbook. I know...it's probably right before the next big thing, and I probably should have waited, but this is my usual MO. And honestly, there's nothing on the horizon that really makes a difference to me. I don't need the ability to watch heavy-duty video on a netbook, I'm OK with not getting Windows 7 the instant it hits the shelves, and the price on this model just dropped (at least in some places on-line) because there's a new replacement model out.

It's a Samsung NC10, and it's pink and white. Yes, pink. A nice pink--dark and sparkly, not pastel or bubblegum. I admit I mostly bought pink because it was the cheapest, but I like it. It's gloss, so it does pick up fingerprints like nobody's business, but it's pretty.

And the keyboard is pretty darned comfortable. I'm impressed thus far. Small, but very solid. Some of the buttons are in slightly odd places or are smaller than normal size (most noteably the arrow/end/page up and down keys), but not nearly as much so as most of the other netbooks I examined at Best Buy before mail ordering. I could touch type straight off, at least on the letter keys. Given a little bit more time, I don't believe it will be any more of an adjustment than going from a computer to a typewriter or a desktop to a laptop or any of the above to the Alphasmart. Speaking of which, somehow my brain has it identified as an Alphasmart, so I keep trying Alphasmart key combination and navigating with arrow keys instead of just using the l'il touchpad. Note to self: CTRL-W is *not* a good key combo to keep hitting in regular Windows applications! This is punishment for being a compulsive word count checker, it would seem.

I have it loaded up with Open Office, yWriter5, FreeMind, and very little else, and plan to keep it that way. It came surprisingly free of bloatware. Which, incidentally, is a word accepted by Firefox's spellchecker, unlike touchpad. Strange, that.

I believe I shall call it Mary Sue, after a laptop in one of my own unfinished novels. How narcissistic is that? Don't answer that.

Over the years I've come to be more and more reluctant to review a product until I've spent a good deal of time with it, so this isn't a review. But I will say, if this lives up to my initial impressions, this may well be the laptop I've been looking for since I first became enamored of them ten or twelve years ago when they were still thick heavy bricks with dim, fuzzy screens, clunky pointing devices and miserable battery life. It's lightweight and very portable, it looks like I'll get at least six or seven hours of battery life, the screen is clearer than my other computer, the keyboard feels good, it'll go in my book bag or purse, and it's cute and pretty and pink. There are some other cool little features, too: the mouse gestures it allows are pretty handy--instant zoom-in or out, for one. It of course doesn't have a very big screen, which is mostly an issue when web surfing (something I hope to keep to a minimum on this machine anyhow). It tends to help me focus, since I can really only view one task at a time. Kind of the Alphasmart outlook on life. It does get a little warm, unlike an Alphasmart, and seven hours of battery life pales in comparison with 700. But I can't imagine doing any editing work on an Alphasmart. I avoid even scrolling back to change a word here and there. This should be just fine for that. It isn't a gaming machine and there are far better computers for watching videos and such, but it may be close to the best portable writing machine available at this time.

Added about eight hundred words to another short story in half an hour at the coffee house this morning, which is good considering I was so self-conscious when I first took it out that I wasn't sure I'd be able to write. I wasn't worried about the relative oddity of the thing, but I live in terror lest someone actually read a sentence or two of what I'm writing--something that isn't as much of an issue with handwritten notes. I am a bundle of neuroses.