Video Review - Nexus 10

Check out our video review of the long awaited Google Nexus 10! Does it live up to our standards? Watch to find out!

A written review is on the way!

We're Back

I'll admit things have been slow here at the Teenstech office (we do have lives ... and jobs). But I'm glad to announce that we are back to full man-power and will begin writing more posts. So if you want a teens perspective, stay tuned to teenstech.com. After all, it's where the cool kids are.

Chromebook Review Revisited

I have owned a Samsung  Series 5 Chromebook since it was released, but I have never used it as my main computer. This all changed when the new Aura update was released. I decided to sell my $2,000 Thinkpad X201 with a Core i7 processor, 8gb of ram, and a 9 cell battery, and rather then purchasing a new computer, I have been using my $300 Chromebook for the last month. Is a Chromebook a viable alternative to a Windows or Mac laptop? Read on to find out!

Form-Factor/Design:

All Chromebooks available today have similar form-factors. They are all relatively thin, light, and attractive. The Samsung Series 5 in particular is very sleek and well constructed. Compared to my X201, the Chromebook is much easier to carry around and feels much better in the hand. Supposedly in the future, Chromebooks will be more like Ultrabooks and Macbook Airs.

Performance:

This is the big question: is ChromeOS as fast as Windows? The answer is yes and no. My Chromebook is able to run smoothly with over 20 tabs/windows open, but with around 30 tabs open, the machine begins to slow down. Flash runs well, even when watching a 720p youtube video and playing an online game at the same time. Webpage load times are fast and very comparable, if not better, than a Windows computer. Photoshop opens ve.... Oh wait, never mind. Because chromebooks don’t need much local storage space, OEMs (PC manufacturers) can create laptops with small but fast solid state drives, giving Chromebooks an edge over slow physical hard drive driven laptops.

One thing that sets Chromebooks apart from the crowd of cheap laptops is its boot time. The fact that Chromebooks are running a super thin client on a solid state drive, allows for around 8 second boot times. And that’s not all. The time to wake up from sleep is only 1 second! In comparison, even with a solid state drive, my x201 boots up in 30 second and wakes from sleep in about 20 seconds.

Applications:

The app ecosystem in Chrome OS is very different from any other platform. Because Chrome OS is browser based, all apps are “in the browser”. You go to the Chrome web store which is much like the Apple App Store. One can download Angry Birds, Google Docs, Google Music, photo editing software, and pretty much anything else you could think of. The “issue” is that most of these apps are just bookmarks to web pages that do not work offline. My answer to this is, “who cares?”. With HTML5, the internet and browsers are powerful and fast enough to run full applications. There are many online photo editing software that works just as well as Photoshop. I am sure that if Adobe was inclined to, Photoshop could be ported to the web and therefore make it to Chromebooks. Though the web has yet to become the main platform for applications, it soon can.

User Interface:

The great thing about Chromebooks, is its simplicity. The fact that Chrome OS is just a browser makes the machine super easy to use. All you do is click on an App, much like in Android and iOS and it opens. Settings are easy to find thanks to the “search box” in the settings tab. And the “quick settings” on the bottom right corner of the taskbar is very utilitarian, allowing you to simply change the volume and brightness without obstructing your work. With the new “windowed” mode in Aura, I am able multitask with ease. The addition of the “window box” on the top right corner of the screen allows you to organize your windows easily, such as making them full screen or half screen (for multitasking).

Productivity:

So is a Chromebook a viable productivity machine? The answer is mostly yes. You are able to type documents, surf the web, work on spreadsheets, and even edit movies, all through the web apps. I found it to be an even more productive device than my windows laptop because there were less distractions. Though you can’t run photoshop (yet) or any intensive Windows application, the Chromebook can handle 99% of my productivity needs.

Conclusion:

Now here is the “issue”: you need internet. For me, this is not an issue at all. Thanks to my school’s continuous wifi and my smartphone’s unlimited tethering, I have internet 24/7. I am so in the “cloud” that I have not a single file that is on a real hard drive. Everything is in Google Drive. This means that without internet, my desktop is just as useless as my Chromebook. This might not be the case for you though. Those without internet won’t find a Chromebook useful, but the internet is becoming more and more prominent in our society today and more and more people have internet all of the time. The “cloud” future is imminent.

Quick Impressions of Chrome OS Aura

It seems like Chrome needed more users, so they decided to overhaul their UI and make it look like the baby of Windows 7 and OS X. But to be honest, it actually works quite well. 

It's speedy, it looks nice, and it feels clean. I actually thought that the transparent dock is better than the semi-transparent dock of Windows, and the app background is a welcome addition as well. Over all, the UI is great.

In addition, the settings menu is also nicer, having the ability to click the bottom right hand corner and adjust everything is amazing. It is a little reminiscent of Honeycomb/Ice Cream Sandwich on tablets. Overall, the Aura update takes UI cues from OS X, Windows and Android, and combined, it works out quite smoothly.

EXCLUSIVE: More Proof that google drive exists!

We have all heard rumors that Google Drive will be released any moment now. I was snooping around the interwebs and I stumbled across this: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/da/edu/chromebooks.html.

Look at the bottom and you will see this:

The link is dead though. Now the only question is: When is it Google Drive going to arrive?!?!

Google takes on Augmented Reality

Codenamed Project Glass, Google has commenced a project that has been part of its long term projects. It showed off a few of its brand new augmented reality glasses, which was claimed to be a revolutionary step forward for the future of augmented reality. Although that might have very well been true, the glasses themselves seem to be poorly designed and lack aesthetics and the almost classiness that goes along with augmented reality. Nonetheless, the promotion video shows some nice features of the glasses.

Google Maps for NES - Happy April Fools!

Looks like Google has done it again, but this time, it has created its own video game: Google Maps, an 8-bit video game for our forgotten NES systems. It's amazing how Google put an ethernet slot into the cartridge. If you decide to get one of these toys, don't forget to "blow on the cartridge to get rid of bugs."

A Bowl of Jellybeans from Android

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday, the Google booth provided visitors with a sweet treat, jellybeans coated with Androids around the jellybean bowl. This is probably the biggest hint of what the Android team has to offer in the coming months, which will possibly be a new version of Android - which will possibly be called Jellybean. Google has declined to make any comment about the mysterious bowl of jellybeans lying on their booth in the middle of the MWC, but we will see in due time.