Google Finally Pitches Chromebooks to Consumers

Google has updated the Chromebooks landing page and is doing a Chrome OS marketing campaign. These promotional activities focus on consumers and switching to a Chromebook from a traditional desktop operating system.

Hallelujah!

So far Google targeted Chromebooks to the educational and corporate worlds, where it was easier to get a head start, and more recently to creators. But it has always been in the consumer space where Chromebooks can provide significant benefits to the majority of ordinary desktop users at home. They spend most of the time in a browser anyway and Chrome OS offers additional advantages such as nearly no maintenance, simplicity, improved security, unobtrusive system updates, affordability, and more.

Now, if only Google could make it easier for consumers to buy Chromebooks outside of the US...

Comments

Post a Comment

All comments are moderated and they are published only if approved by the blog owner. Comments that are spammy, trolling, hateful, malicious, or otherwise inappropriate will be removed without notice at the sole discretion of the blog owner.

Popular posts from this blog

Why I Stopped Using My Xiaomi Mi Band 4

Image
I bought a Xiaomi Mi Band 4 from Amazon and returned it the day after it arrived. Why? Because of some usability issues tech reviews don’t tell about.


Why I wanted the Mi Band 4 I actually didn’t want a fitness tracker.

My Moto 360 2015 smartwatch is apparently dying. So I wanted a replacement for the Moto 360’s most useful feature to me, the ability to show the notifications from the phone when it’s more convenient to twist the wrist than to reach and grab the phone. I thought the Mi Band 4, a popular and affordable device, could do an acceptable job at that.

Usability issues The Mi Band 4 seems like a good and useful fitness tracker with a clean user interface.

But, when I tried it, I realized it has some usability issues that make it less suited for what I needed. The first is the font of text longer than a few words such as in notifications is so tiny, with prescription glasses I have to strain to read most of the text — barely — if I keep the device close to the eyes. A related i…
Read more

Two Books About the Kivy GUI Framework

Image
The Kivy Python GUI framework is intriguing.

Not only it’s cross-platform but also supports Android. Java is too verbose and low level for me and Kivy is an opportunity for developing native Android apps without leaving Python.

Outside of the Kivy project documentation, there are few third-party advanced tutorials that go in more depth than the official tutorials. So, before diving into the code of the Kivy demos, I wanted some books to explore more features and get a broader picture of the framework and what it can do.

I found two potentially interesting books: Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Studio: With Pyjnius, Plyer, and Buildozer by Ahmed Fawzy Mohamed Gad (Apress, 2019), and Kivy - Interactive Applications and Games in Python - Second Edition by Roberto Ulloa (Packt, 2015).

I read both and here are my impressions.

Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Studio I had much hope for Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Stu…
Read more

StreamYard as an Alternative to Hangouts on Air: First Impressions

Image
Google discontinued Hangouts on Air on August 1, 2019. The StreamYard video streaming platform is the best replacement I found among the alternatives. I'm going to tell how I tested StreamYard in a demanding situation and what I've learned.

StreamYard can livestream video feeds from up to 6 participants and save a recording to YouTube or other video platforms. It works fully in the cloud, a huge plus for a Chrome OS user like me. And it’s even better than Hangouts on Air as it has additional useful features such as showing user comments in the YouTube chat of a livestream and banners, i.e. text cards. It also provides a few preset layouts for arranging on the screen the camera feeds of the participants.

A key feature is the ability to screenshare a desktop window or browser tab as well as any audio playing there. This allows, for example, to stream a YouTube video along with its soundtrack.

The product has a free tier that overlays StreamYard’s logo in livestreams and misses a…
Read more