Instant on

Following on from my last about the instant on of Chromebooks compared to almost anything else, I was playing with J's HP Beats Audio laptop (purchased late 2012 at the start of the Windows 8 debacle when it was the only Win7 device left in the store) trying to get an old Wacom tablet to work.

The laptop is still on Windows 7 so I thought we might be in with a chance - we weren't. But when I gave up and shut it down I noticed a second power on button next to the 'proper' power button.

So I pressed it.

And it booted up into a customised copy of firefox running in a little linux kiosk environment. I'm guessing there's some jiggery pokery on the circuit board that boots from the main disk if the big power button is pressed, or from linux, either from a separate partition or a little  bit of SD ram if the second button is pressed.

The nice thing about it is that it is instant on - not quite as fast as a Chromebook, but not far off it, and with a recent browser, good enough for gmail, outlook, evernote, zoho docs or almost anything else you can think of.

And it's instant off as well, making it idea for checking mail, writing a quick note or whatever.

Nice one HP !

Chromebooks vs tablets

Despite the fact that I'm writing this using gedit on a Linux laptop, I'm increasingly finding that I'm using my chromebook in place of either of my two Android tablets.

Don't get me wrong, tablets are good lightweight devices, and when I'm away from home I find the small form factor of the 7" device, as well as good battery life makes it an invaluable companion device.

At home, however, I surf the web, interact with websites and write things and also edit spreadsheets. And it's a hell of a lot easier to work with spreadsheets and text on device with a keyboard.

It so happens that beacuse I use gmail to read mail, and inoreader to read my rss feeds I can use browser based applications as straight alternatives to locally downloaded apps, and with a reasonable network connection offloading a lot of the processing is feasible.

A chromebook isn't the only possibility. I could use my MacBook Air - the form factor's about the same and web based applications run just as well on it, and of course I could use something like TextWrangler or FocusWriter as a lightweight writing tool for offline work, and certainly the Air would be  (and is) the goto device for anytime I'm offline.

But compared to the Air, the Chromebook offers instant on and instant off - checking a link, or something on wikipedia means that you can work the way I work with a tablet when I'm reading or researching something, as an electronic scribblepad cum library search device, and instant on means I don't need to have it powered up, or indeed be constantly in search of a power socket. (Don't get me started about my windows laptop, despite the improvements with Windows 10, the boot process is elephantine to say the least).

And this means I can work from the sofa, the back deck, basically anywhere I can get a decent signal.

And using a linux laptop? Well sometimes one needs a general purpose computer with a little bit of grunt to run a bit of perl or python ...