CloudBook Product Diary

After reading Jeff’s post on the new gOS Space 2.9, I was psyched to try and port it over to the CloudBook. The operating system looked sick (as in awesome, not physically ill) on his desktop. The transparent dock on the bottom made the whole screen look sleek and the celestial wallpaper gave the system a more futuristic aura.

I figured if any system needed a refreshed gOS, it was the CloudBook (which came running gOS Rocket). Therein lay my mission: become the Joan of Arc of the CloudBook and get gOS Space to run on the ailing system.

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When we first got our CloudBook last Friday, we were wondering if we had gotten a preproduction unit with a preproduction version of the OS, because we initially found that some of the buttons in certain configuration windows were appearing below the screen. When we wrote to Everex’s Paul Kim about the problem, he initially responded:

I found the same issue with the initialization screen as you did: It looks like the gOS team loaded the wrong size opening windows on a few of the press samples. I’m talking to them now to try to see what happened but will keep you updated.

So we spent all weekend playing with the CloudBook, but unsure of whether we had the same CloudBook that other users were receiving. As we waited for a reply from Everex, other users started receiving their CloudBooks and noticing the same issues we were having with buttons below the screen, with slow booting, and with Wi-Fi connectivity (which gets better after you download some updates). Yesterday, Paul Kim confirmed that we have the same software as all the other users who received a CloudBook.

So now that we know we’re dealing with the same hardware and software as our fellow CloudBook users, I’d like to focus our coverage on making the most of the machine through tips, tricks, and hacks. I’ve gotten some great advice in the comments section from other users and I’ve seen some interesting tips posted on the forums at CloudBooker and on Jamfish’s CloudBook blog.

Please drop some of your tips or things you’d like someone to try in the comments section below and I’ll get to them in the days ahead. I’d like to start by doing things that don’t involve replacing the OS so we can offer advice to users they can use without replacing the operating system. After that, I’ll be happy to try installing Xubuntu or Windows XP.

“The waiting is the hardest part,” Tom Petty sang in 1981. Little did he know he was actually referring to the CloudBook that’s sitting on my dining room table. Some applications load with relative speed, but others seem to take forever.

For example, the other day I was trying to use the Add/Remove applications feature to see if I could install more programs. You see, unlike Microsoft Windows’ Add/Remove Programs tool which exists primarily to help you uninstall apps you no longer want, the Add/Remove in gOS / Ubuntu gives you a very extensive list of available applications you don’t have yet, but could download and install. It’s even searchable. That’s a good thing, because unless you’re a hardcore Linux user, you may not know where to find all the latest Ubuntu-compatible applications.

Unfortunately, what happens when I select Add/Remove from the applications menu is not pleasant. I took a video to show you the ugly results.

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A few hours ago, I was talking about how the CloudBook we received from Everex on Friday takes nearly three minutes to boot and then how it takes nearly two minutes to wake from hibernation. So I was wondering how the Eee PC compares.

I set up a brand new Eee PC with factory default settings on my dining room table and filmed it cold booting and waking from hibernation. The videos below show just how quickly the Asus UMPC performs these tasks.

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So tonight, I decided to try the most obvious use case for the CloudBook, simple wireless Web surfing. I curled up on the couch with the CloudBook while I was watching a little TV. One of my cats came over and lay at my feet and I started poking around the Internet looking for a bargain on a new digital camcorder (filming the CloudBook has revealed that my camcorder sucks). I was having a good go of it for about half an hour and then, out of nowhere, the Internet connection died.

I say the Internet connection died, because I was no longer able to pull up any Web sites. However, the CloudBook still indicated that I was connected to my wireless network and it’s clear that the Internet connectivity in my house was unaffected, because my wife was listening to Internet radio the entire time.

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I have to admit I don’t have a lot of patience. Maybe it’s the 8 cans of diet coke I drink a day, but I can’t stand sitting and waiting for a computer to do anything. So slow boot times drive me crazy. I have a dream that someday all computers will have instant on.

I used to have an IBM Workpad z50 PDA which looked like a miniature Thinkpad and ran Windows CE 2.11. The operating system was too lame to use for long, but the thing gave you control of your desktop the second you hit the on button.

Of course, any real PC takes a while to boot up and, if you count logging in and watching the hard drive whir, it can be a good minute or two from the time you hit the start button to the time you can start using the computer.

Even in a world where every computer starts too slowly, the CloudBook stands out. I filmed the machine cold booting to get an accurate read of how long this system takes before it gives you control of the desktop. If you have some time, take a look at the video below and tell me whether I’m just impatient or whether you’d tear your hair out waiting for this too.

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If you’ve been following my CloudBook journey, you know that one of the first things I did with the CloudBook was log in to WordPress and write a blog post. I noticed, at the time, that I had to scroll a lot to see what I was working on and to perform simple WordPress tags, like inserting an image. Having to scroll a lot is not a problem inherent to the CloudBook; it’s a problem inherent to any computer with a native resolution of 800×480. These days, 480 pixels of height just doesn’t fit what it used to.

JAmerican suggested in the comments section that I try running Firefox full screen to get more screen real estate. I hit F11 and noticed a sizable difference. I tried the same thing on the Eee PC and was surprised to see a noticeable difference between full screen Firefox on the two machines. Just look at these screen shots.

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I consider myself a huge geek so, when I think about the CloudBook and the Eee PC, sometimes I wonder if I’m the “typical user” that Asus and Everex are trying to reach. If the typical user is a mobile professional who wants something really light and thin to carry around town or bring into the conference room for meetings, then pushing the envelope and blogging in WordPress or editing photos in GIMP on these machines is important. But what about just the basics: surfing the Web, watching online videos, and checking e-mail?

I sat down this morning and tried watching some online videos on both the CloudBook and on the Asus Eee PC 2G Surf. When I visited YouTube, both worked comparably well, loading videos quickly and playing them easily without skipping. However, when I went to CNN’s video channel to watch some news, I noticed a stark difference. When I clicked a link to open a new CNN video on the Eee PC, the video loaded and started playing almost immediately, though it stuttered for the first few seconds while it was buffering.

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I haven’t had much experience with the Eee PC like my coworkers have so I don’t know if the Eee PC gets uncomfortably hot after hours of use, but I can say that tonight I was using the CloudBook on my dining room table for about five hours and, after a while, I could feel a fair amount of heat radiating from the machine. I lifted the CloudBook off the table and felt the bottom. Wow, hot stuff!

Perhaps this level of heat is to be expected for a device this small, but let’s just say I wouldn’t put this on my own laptop for long unless I was wearing a very thick pair of pants or wanted to avoid having children. I can’t think of an objective way to measure the temperature, but if any of you have suggestions, please comment.

The animated icons are probably the coolest-looking part of the gOS operating system that comes pre-installed on the CloudBook. Before I got a look at the gOS operating system, my impression of Linux (from my days experimenting with Red Hat) was that it’s a functional operating system, but not very attractive.

The plain, Windows 3.1-esque look of most Linux distributions can be a huge turnoff, so the Mac OS X-like look of gOS is a huge step in the right direction. It’s just a little difficult to have both the dock at the bottom of your screen and the Gnome bar at the top when all you have to work with is 400 pixels of vertical space. The dock disappears when you’re using an application, but it appears when you hover over the bottom portion of the screen, sometimes inadvertently covering buttons at the moment you try to click them.

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