Google laptop for those who live in cloud

Is the world ready to live in the cloud?

Google is betting yes, unveiling Thursday morning its widely rumored touch-screen Chromebook, a high-end laptop designed to propel the shift toward a computing model where most of our applications and data live online.

The Chromebook Pixel, starting at $1,299, represents the most ambitious push into hardware yet for the Mountain View search giant, which designed and built the computer in-house. Its touch-screen capability, flash hard drive, fast processor and super high-resolution display put the product in head-to-head competition with the top offerings of chief rivals Apple and Microsoft.

But the Pixel's use of Google's Chrome operating system, lightweight software that relies on online processing, services and storage, represents a move in a distinct direction. It's a path that may well lead to the future, where all of our computing is done online. It's just not clear yet whether it looks enough like the present to be a breakthrough product.

Earlier versions of the Chromebook were positioned largely as second computers, accompaniments to a full-fledged desktop or laptop. At a San Francisco news conference Thursday, Chrome Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai argued that the Pixel is itself a primary device, at least for power users who already do most of their computing online.

Rethinking laptops

"The idea was rethinking everything in the laptop," he said. "To design something that we believed was the best laptop possible for these users, people who want to live in the cloud."

Pichai said Google intends to earn a profit from the product, but it's trying to sell more than a new computer. The company is trying to sell a new way of computing: Shifting more of it online means nudging more people into Google's Web services, including the Google Drive applications that compete with the popular Microsoft Office suite.

At this point, though, it's unclear how large the market will be for the Pixel. Earlier versions of the Chromebook generally ran in the $200 to $300 range, a low enough price to justify some obvious sacrifices.

Most notably, applications written specifically for Microsoft or Apple's dominant computer operating systems don't work on Chromebooks. That includes popular software like Photoshop, Reader and Final Cut, as well as competing Web browsers.

The other big drawback is that use is limited when a primarily Web-based device runs offline, as anyone with a Wi-Fi-only tablet will quickly learn riding BART (where the Wi-Fi almost never works these days - ahem, WiFi Rail of Sacramento).

Google has made significant strides in these areas since late 2010, when it handed journalists Chromebook prototypes that didn't even have an accessible hard drive.

Notably, Google's suite of online productivity tools, Google Drive, now automatically stores 100 of the most recently accessed documents to the Chromebook drive. That enables users to continue working productively when they're offline on BART, airplanes or mountaintops. The number of files will go up to 1,000 in the weeks ahead.

In addition, Chromebook users will soon be able to open popular Microsoft file types like Word and Excel in their browsers, edit the documents and e-mail them back in their original format. (Previously, you could only open a Microsoft file and edit it as a Google document. Users still won't be able to create a Word or Excel document from scratch.)

Meanwhile, a growing number of developers are building online versions of their products that run within the Chrome browser, known as Web apps, including Dropbox, Evernote and TweetDeck (to name three of my favorites). Google hopes to continue getting more developers to do so.

Too big a cost?

Still, a clear gap remains between the usability of a Chromebook Pixel and, say, a MacBook Pro with Retina display. And yet the latter starts at just $50 more. The MacBook Air and many Windows laptops cost far less.

The advantage of an online operating system is that it starts up in a flash, runs software and security updates automatically and shouldn't require as much hardware storage and processing power.

But as long as we live in a world without ubiquitous Internet access, and where developers find it more profitable to write software for better-known operating systems, it's not clear that those are big enough advantages to offset the downsides. At least not without a steep discount.

A Pixel portrait

Some fact and figures about the new Chromebook Pixel computer:

-- It features an Intel Core i5 processor, 4 gigabytes of RAM and a high-resolution screen that just edges out Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina display in terms of pixel density. A terabyte of free online space on Google Drive is included for three years.

-- The entry-level, Wi-Fi-only model includes a 32-GB solid-state drive and starts at $1,299.

-- The top-end model, with a 64-GB flash drive and Verizon LTE wireless service, is $1,449.

-- Design improvements in the keyboard and touch-pad are aimed at making it comfortable to use over long periods. A set of three microphones boost noise-canceling during operations such as video chats.

-- In tests, the fully charged battery lasted more than five hours.

-- The Pixel can be ordered at https://play.google.com/store or Bestbuy.com, and is expected to ship in the first week of April.

Source: http://feeds.sfgate.com/click.phdo?i=46899b823968a2a00962d988d6ae4ef9

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