News - Samsung unveils Chromebook 2 series with stitched plastic finish

[HEXUS]

Updated Chromebooks will be available in both 11.6 and 13.3-inch versions.

Read more.

[sykobee]

1080p screen, eight-core CPU (yeah, 4 ARM A15s and 4 ARM A7s rather than Haswell) and nearly 9 hour battery life for $399 - that's not too bad really. How much DropBox/Box.com/Google Drive storage does it come with?

[Chadders87]

Damn. If only it wasn't a chromebook :/

[CampGareth]

Damn. If only it wasn't a chromebook :/

If you're thinking linux, that will probably work too or at least it has on all the previous chromebooks. I must admit I'm very tempted to pick the 13.3" one up for that purpose

[virtuo]

If you're thinking linux, that will probably work too or at least it has on all the previous chromebooks. I must admit I'm very tempted to pick the 13.3" one up for that purpose

Same here, I wasn't convinced with Chromebooks until I tried one using ChromeOS, whacking a decent linux distro on there at 1080p would be magnificent for the money.

These haven't been confirmed for the UK though - as far as I can tell.

[vicar]

Still not convinced, will prefer a net book or tablet over chrome anytime.

[moeburn]

All the leather stitching in the world won't fix the unholy Hell that is ChromeOS.

[MrRockliffe]

1080p screen, eight-core CPU (yeah, 4 ARM A15s and 4 ARM A7s rather than Haswell) and nearly 9 hour battery life for $399 - that's not too bad really. How much DropBox/Box.com/Google Drive storage does it come with?

I got 100GB free when I got my chromebook. Not sure if they still offer that though.

[herulach]

Same here, I wasn't convinced with Chromebooks until I tried one using ChromeOS, whacking a decent linux distro on there at 1080p would be magnificent for the money.

These haven't been confirmed for the UK though - as far as I can tell.

Be careful of assuming that you'll be able to get all your common stuff though. Raspi has probably created a lot of arm ports, but a lot of stuff isn't available.

[CampGareth]

Be careful of assuming that you'll be able to get all your common stuff though. Raspi has probably created a lot of arm ports, but a lot of stuff isn't available.

If the Raspi is your basis for whether ARM is useful, remember that the Raspi uses ARMv6 not ARMv7 so it can't run webkit for modern browsers, even android dropped ARMv6 after 2.3. ARMv7 pretty much anything that doesn't rely on x86 specific features should work, though it might not be available in repositories in which case you'd have to compile your own.

Unfortunately I don't know of a decent way to check and see if all your stuff is in the easy repositories so figuring that out before purchasing would be good.

[herulach]

If the Raspi is your basis for whether ARM is useful, remember that the Raspi uses ARMv6 not ARMv7 so it can't run webkit for modern browsers, even android dropped ARMv6 after 2.3. ARMv7 pretty much anything that doesn't rely on x86 specific features should work, though it might not be available in repositories in which case you'd have to compile your own.

Unfortunately I don't know of a decent way to check and see if all your stuff is in the easy repositories so figuring that out before purchasing would be good.

It isn't I have at least 2 arm devices flopping around the place, what I meant was there seems to be a big drive to get stuff running on arm driven by raspi. The state of a lot of things on ARM historically was even worse than it is now.

[CampGareth]

It isn't I have at least 2 arm devices flopping around the place, what I meant was there seems to be a big drive to get stuff running on arm driven by raspi. The state of a lot of things on ARM historically was even worse than it is now.

Fair enough, makes me wonder about PowerPC, MIPS and Sparc, all those alternative ISAs we don't see that often in the mainstream. How many up to date packages in say the debian repos have they had over time?

[herulach]

Fair enough, makes me wonder about PowerPC, MIPS and Sparc, all those alternative ISAs we don't see that often in the mainstream. How many up to date packages in say the debian repos have they had over time?

For server use probably plenty. But your general desktop stuff, not too many at a guess.

[Brewster0101]

Still not convinced, will prefer a net book or tablet over chrome anytime.

Netbook with Windows = Slow compared to Chromebook
Tablets don't offer the full convenience of a keyboard/laptop - plus the web browsers still don't behave as well as a desktop browser.

Much to be desired at these new models - much indeed :-)

[virtuo]

Be careful of assuming that you'll be able to get all your common stuff though. Raspi has probably created a lot of arm ports, but a lot of stuff isn't available.

Good point, when I say magnificent, I did mean for my uses (which essentially have me sitting on the sofa SSH'd in to another server happily coding away in a terminal). I've seen Arch running dual-boot on the current Samsung Chromebook and it seemed pretty complete,

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/ar...ung-chromebook

Apparently there's a decent Debian and Ubuntu branch for ARM as well. I've got friends coming over from the States in May, for £250-ish I think it'd be worth having one (or two) brought over.

[crossy]

Netbook with Windows = Slow compared to Chromebook
Tablets don't offer the full convenience of a keyboard/laptop - plus the web browsers still don't behave as well as a desktop browser.

Much to be desired at these new models - much indeed :-)

So slap Linux on that netbook - last one I tried (Samsung NC-10 that was <£100) ran Mint and Ubuntu very nicely.

Correction for that second sentence - most tablets don't offer the full convenience of keyboard. You forgot about the Asus Transformer series, which definitely DO (e.g. keyboard shortcuts for select, cut and paste).

ChromeOS is a big "meh" in my book. Like most of the folks here I'd be more interested in these as a way to run a proper OS - Ubuntu or something similar that doesn't seem to need a net connection to be able to do anything. Actually I'm wondering if it'd be possible to put a decent (i.e. with keyboard/trackpad support) version of Android on there. There's a couple of custom ROM's done for the Transformers that support the integrated controllers, so surely should be possible to do one for this?