Yes, I realize it sounds wobbly. Bandwidth is only one of the many objections CC faces. OTOH, CC does offer substantive benefits as well, although most of these are for the vendors rather than the end-user.

Yes, I realize it sounds wobbly. Bandwidth is only one of the many objections CC faces. OTOH, CC does offer substantive benefits as well, although most of these are for the vendors rather than the end-user.

ChomeOS has no local applications, so there is no PDF viewer on the machine. The resulting output can be cached for faster repeat viewing (until the cache entry is flushed), but the upload/download cycle is required.

When I hear “device that doesn't run any native apps, only web apps”, I think “2GB flash, 7-inch screen, $99 on Black Friday next year”. Not that that's a bad thing, but at this point people assume that a laptop that costs 400 bucks is going to actually be a laptop and not an Internet appliance. Even $200 laptops run full versions of XP or Ubuntu nowadays, and a 7 second boot time says “Hyperspace minus Firefox”. But a $99 ARM-based thing that boots in 10 seconds would be fine. I'd buy one, as long as I could hack it and boot to a real OS when I wanted to.

Also, if “doesn't run native apps” is implemented the same way as on Palm WebOS, it's a euphemism for “the only way to run native apps is to write them as Mozilla plugins”. Does anyone really think this thing will forgo the “real” Adobe Flash plugin in favor of some Chrome/Gnash mashup that won't play Hulu videos?

Finally, naming your browser and operating system the same thing as your competition's user interface layer is just obnoxious.

The only reason Intel+Microsoft “netbooks” are small, is cause Intel+Microsoft are so very scared to take away all of their existing profit margins from larger sized laptops.

It just is, Google is planning for 50-100 dollar netbooks to be available with Chrome OS pre-installed. That will be better.

Some of the demonstrated functionality would only feasibly work on a local (LAN) connection. Opening small documents is fine. However, since everything is sent to the cloud, large documents (for example big PDFs, videos, the 150 photos on your camera) will take many minutes (possibly hours) to open.

People that don't understand what is happening will invariably consider the function broken.

Likewise, I'm not sure the content companies will be happy that you are copying and uploading content to Google. Some content on your computer has restricted copyright and even backups are prohibited. While the end-user has no control over this process when using ChomeOS, legally I'm pretty sure they will be the ones that are responsible.

In short, until bandwidth reaches the magical 100Mb/s/100Mbs and content companies give up control over their media, cloud-based computing is a hot mess.

How can something fitting that description still be called a netbook?

Granted, the current definition was made by Microsoft and Intel, but it's pretty well established. Netbooks are small, cheap laptops. If it isn't small or cheap, then it's just a laptop.