Shakedown (Updated)

From CR-48

So i have now had more than a day to play withe the CR-48. Like everyone else who has spent some time with this thing, I am very impressed with the quality of the hardware. This is no throw-away netbook. Overall, I would say that the build quality of this thing is better than that of the Toshiba tablet that I spent well over a thousand dollars on. Some of this, admittedly, is due to the perceived quality from the low-profile chiclet-style keyboard and the soft-touch matte-finish of it all. That aside, its still pretty darn thin and feels pretty damn sturdy.

Unfortunately, not everything about this thing seems ready for prime time (but then again I am basically beta testing), I had heard grumblings about trackpad issues before I had taken delivery. Sure enough, it is, in fact, multi-touch. When it wants to be. I haven't quite figured out how to get it to work when I want it to, though. The main culprit seems to be the clicky part that makes up the bottom half of the pad. If I rest my thumb on it and attempt to use the rest of the trackpad to move the cursor, it tends to freak out and not do anything. Additionally, when I try to take my finger off the trackpad completely and then click with my thumb, it will start to move the cursor around, sensing the slight movements of my thumb as I click. Luckily, the trackpad also supports tap-to-click, which is how I typically used the trackpad on my Toshiba. Two finger scrolling works perfectly as does two finger clicking (right clicking); though I will need to get used to it.

Okay, this blog post is dragging. Time for bullet points! Other things I've noticed:

• some video stuff seem sluggish or choppy (i.e. sliding menus, scrolling certain sites)
• videos in general run skippy (hulu, etc.)
• volume control causes the entire screen to flash white when playing a video in full screen
• gtalk doesnt work at all in gmail (but the gtalk app works fine)
• took about 5 tries to DL a zip file. That was annoying.

I am assuming that many, if not all, of these bugs will be addressed as the OS is developed and polished. We shall see...

Update:

• flash crashed and wouldn't come back while watching ustream. (sorry Marian...)