Google's incredibly basic, $149 laptop

Google's incredibly basic, $149 laptop - and it was perfect

Earlier this week, Google released unto the world two new Chromebook laptops (among many other devices) from manufacturers Hisense and Haier, priced at a low, low $149 - cheaper than most tablets, and for a full computer, to boot. Google's on a mission to provide a lot of computer for a not a lot of money.

About the Chromebook

The first and most important thing to know about the Hisense Chromebook is that literally all it has by way of an operating system is the browser. Log in to the Chromebook with a Google account and you're up and ready to go. Want to use email, Spotify, Twitter, Evernote, Slack, or even Amazon Kindle? Get ready to use the webpage versions.

Even when you install "apps" from the Chrome Web Store, clicking them just launches the appropriate web link in a browser tab. That means that you're never going to run the full versions of Microsoft Office or basically anything else.

The upsides to this aren't immediately obvious, but it means that it's cheap, manufacturers don't have to pay for Microsoft Windows to come pre-installed on the devices, and that gets passed down to you. And since just running a browser doesn't take that much computing horsepower, the device turns on in a snap and works pretty quickly.

And since you're only really using stuff in the browser anyway, if something happens to the machine, most of your stuff is still hosted with Google/Facebook/Amazon/whoever anyway, so nothing of value is usually lost.

There are limitations - you're not going to be doing anything resource-heavy like playing new video games like Battlefield: Hardline or editing movies, not that you'd want to on its mediocre screen. But it's pretty good at checking Facebook, writing email, and reading the news. Soon, Chromebooks will get even more useful with the addition of the ability to run certain Android apps.

This is something that's common to all of Google's Chrome OS computers, including other Chromebooks, the Chromebox desktop, and the Chromebase all-in-one, but it's probably still the least-understood part of these devices, judging from people's reactions when I showed them the Chromebook.

The construction of the thing is pretty good too, for a $149 device. I'm not sure it would qualify as "sleek," but the plastic casing isn't the ugliest I've ever seen. The mouse touchpad, too, is of surprisingly decent quality, save for the occasional bouts of odd jitteriness. There's even an HDMI port on the side, in addition to two USB ports.

The $149 Hisense Chromebook's design is surprisingly sleek for such a budget machine.

How I used it

I had never actually used a Chromebook before. Once upon a time, I used a Google Chromebox from Asus for a week, which is the same idea, but it was during a vacation and I didn't have much to do with it.

The first day I had the Hisense Chromebook, I struggled with this. At Business Insider, we write our stories directly into a website in the browser, and for whatever reason, it kept loading the mobile version of the website - maybe because the Chromebook uses an ARM processor, the same kind of chip you usually find in smartphones and tablets.

That same ARM processor means that the Hisense Chromebook gets pretty good battery life, save for one instance where I left it in sleep mode in my bag and the battery kept discharging. Other than that one time, I've gotten a pretty solid 6 hours out of a full charge.

I use a Macbook Air issued to me by Business Insider most of the time, and it's been my primary computer for the month I've been here. But it's a work machine where I get my work done - which means that when I flip it open, a barrage of Twitter and email notifications turn me over into work mode whether I want to be or not.

Size and thickness comparison between Haier Chromebook and Macbook Air.

Just for kicks, I wrote a Medium post on the Hisense Chromebook, and found that the uncluttered, nothing-but-browser interface kept me singularly focused on what I was doing. And since it turns on so quickly, it became my go-to for quick little things like doing some online banking, checking a recipe, or even changing a setting on am Internet router.

It's not that using the Macbook Air is a hardship, exactly. It's more that the Chromebook can be relied on to turn on instantly, do what I need it to do quickly without expending too much battery, and then go back into my backpack.

At $149, it's the perfect device - fast, with a keyboard, and versatile enough to do most things - to just have around to do anything but work. It's a mediocre machine, but at that price, that's far more than I could have asked for.

source -businessinside

Team Work - Meaning and Tips for better Team Work

A single brain is not always capable of making key decisions on its own. To come up with an efficient solution, an individual requires the help and advice of others. A team is established when individuals get together on a common platform with the common goal of completing a task. To guarantee optimum compatibility, team members should ideally come from similar backgrounds and have a single aim. To provide their best, the team members must complement each other and function as a single unit in tight cooperation. "There is no I in Team Work," as the saying goes, and each member must put the needs of his team first. Personal interests must take a second seat. Any team's performance is directly proportionate to the relationship between its members and their combined efforts. What is the definition of teamwork? Teamwork is defined as the sum of each team member's efforts toward the fulfilment of the team's goal. In other words, any team's backbone is its ability t

Scientists discover a new theory / The fundamental property of light – 150 years after Maxwell

Light plays a vital role in our everyday lives and technologies based on light are all around us. So we might expect that our understanding of light is pretty settled. But scientists have just uncovered a new fundamental property of light that gives new insight into the 150-year-old classical theory of electromagnetism and which could lead to applications manipulating light at the nanoscale. It is unusual for a pure-theory physics paper to make it into the journal Science. So when one does, it’s worth a closer look. In the new study, researchers bring together one of physics' most venerable set of equations – those of James Clerk’s Maxwell’s famous theory of light – with one of the hot topics in modern solid-state physics: the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators . To understand what the fuss is about, let’s first consider the behaviour of electrons in the quantum spin Hall effect. Electrons possess an intrinsic spin as if they were tiny spinning-tops,

19 Types Of Content Writing Services For Your Business

It’s hard to know which type of content writing service is the best for your business. There are so many different types of content writing services out there that it’s easy to get confused. You end up wondering if you’re choosing the right one for you. In this post, we’ll get rid of this confusion, once and for all. I’m going to list out the different kinds of writing services you could use. By the end of this article, you’ll know whether you need a copywriter, a content writer, or a social media marketer and how they can help you achieve your business goals. This post is also useful for writers who want to hone their writing skills in a specific area. Let’s dive in and learn what types of content writing services exist and when you should use them. (Bonus – if you want to hire the top 1% of writers, go to the bottom to learn how). Types of Content Writing Services As we go through the list of content writing services, you will find that many of them overlap. That’s perfectly

The LimitlessX - Get Tech Science News around the Globe

Search This Blog