In general, Chromebook is a browser book! Is this a problem? For me, I was able to live one year fully with Chromebook Pixel as my main laptop – without Windows at all! It does almost everything you might need in your normal activities with low cost and good performance. I just missed some things that I can summarize in:
- No good streaming media support (I wasn’t able to run Tunein)
- No file propriety (metadata) or multi edit (example, renaming files or changing the meta of pictures)
- No ePub/eBook (ascm)
- No CSV (text to Columns)
- No Skype – Texting is available on Outlook.com
- Some programming features in related to MS SQL & ASP
(In my area, I wasn’t able to buy books or music from Google Play)
I have many of indexed PDF books; reading through the default Chromebook PDF isn’t that good. I also lose a lot of features by uploading the PDFs into Google Play Books app. I think Google Play Book needs to be enhanced to enable searching in uploaded books, indexing, and renaming of bookmarks. OR, Adobe should invest in Chrome OS!
Currently I’m not doing a lot of web designing projects (MS SQL and ASP). Hence, I haven’t had big problems here. There are some alternatives for writing and testing codes or connecting to servers to run queries… However, I believe these weren’t really meant for advanced programmers.
Working with rooting Android mobiles is almost impossible. Things might be changing nowadays. In relevant to this, Android apps are getting slowly merged into Chrome OS.
For a while, when I got back later to Windows’, I found that I’m turning my Win8 laptop into a Chromebook (theme, display, and apps). I only used Chrome Apps even if there are alternatives on Windows. I used Caret for editing VB’s instead of Visual Studio!! (As I mentioned, I’m currently not running big projects here). However, there are some problems with fonts displaying (font rendering) on Chrome browser. Firefox is still the best on Windows machines.
My opinion is to really be able to live with Windows’, the hardware should be at its best! (i.e., more money to be spent). I think Microsoft can try to reduce the prices instead of spending money on marketing campaigns against Google. On another side, Google is providing a lot of facilities to encourage developers on Chrome OS and Android!