Unboxing the Google Samsung Chromebook

Hi Dave Johnson, editor of eHow Tech and let’s talk for a minute about let’s say you’re shopping for a gift for somebody who doesn’t love windows like my parents would be a good example. That’s fine because they don’t really run many programs, they they spend most of their time on the web. For someone like that Google wants you to buy their Chromebook. Let’s open this up and see what’s under the hood of a Google Chomebook. Now this one is the Samsung and this costs about $299. There are a number of Chromebooks that range in price all the way up to a thousand dollars or more but this is a really good, less expensive model that does, in my estimation, everything that you need a laptop to do if you’re not a windows fanatic. This has powercord, here is the chromebook, and then last but not least we have a quickstart guide and that’s everything that’s in the box. It runs the Chrome OS and what does that mean? Well it is an Operating System that you can think of it as little more than a web browser. I can open up my chromebook, comes up almost instantly, very very fast boot. Sure I have a desk top but in the chrome OS you’re not going to see apps or programs that run on this desktop like like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. You have to change the way you think about laptops or or computers when you have a chromebook because everything runs in a browser window. If you invest in a Chromebook, you’re getting a really different experience. Over in the lower right corner over here I have common settings for like for example connecting to WiFi or using Bluetooth or setting the time. Over here on the left side are common apps that I might want to run. I can also run email so obviously since this is a google laptop I can get access to my gmail and any mail that I forward to gmail. I can also open up the google web app store. So this store lets me download games and apps and they all run inside the browser and last but not least is worth pointing out that you don’t really store files locally on this laptop, it has a little bit of memory, but the intent is that you’re going to store things on your google drive account and in fact when you get a chromebook you get a hundred gigabytes of storage for free for two years. After that, if you want to maintain the hundred gigabytes, it’s going to cost money. For example, I can access all of my music which I have let google access from my home computer. I can go to my google drive account and work on documents instead of editing in say Microsoft Word, I’m gonna use Google Prime Docs. It’s a really different and interesting way to work. I find it in a lot of ways really liberating because this is a very very lightweight laptop that has a very long battery run time, very different experience from using a traditional Windows Laptop. For folks that are really invested in Windows and run programs all the time on their desktop, this isn’t the right choice but if you know someone in your family or you’re that person who really only spends time on the web and uses Google Docs and that sort of thing then this is a really interesting option and I think you’ll find that it’s gonna simplify your life.