hi, we're on eeevolution.it with the asus chromebox. this is a minipc powered by chrome os, designed mainly for three good things: being cheap, reliable and powerful enough, easy to use. it's been connected to my external display for two weeks
Android TV on chromebox, and now i'm ready to show you how it works. this is the first asus' device with chrome os, but soon we'll see some laptops as well. in the u.s. the price is 179 dollars, about 150 euros,
and it's been sold out for weeks on amazon and such because there's no other minipc with this configuration at this price. powered by a last generation dual-core celeron by intel, four usb ports, the gigabit ethernet, sd reader, wi-fi, bluetooth... and most of all you can take off the back panel -- we saw that in the unbox -- and upgrade the ram to 8 gb, moreover there are two free slots and the ssd disk. last but not least to complete the hardware equipment, there are two video output, hdmi and displayport. great equipment... available at this price just thanks to trade agreements
between google, asus and intel to promote devices with chrome os. it's not fanless, there's a little fan on the rear but i assure you won't hear it... we could say it's almost completely quiet. ok... leaving the hardware part, 'cause i've really nothing to say about it -- please read the complete review for more technical details -- and let's move on to talk about the use of this google operating system. how does this chrome os work? what can you do -- or rather, what you can't -- with it? let's see. and here we are, with chromebox connected
to keyboard, mouse and full hd screen. i'm turning it on... and in 7-8 secs here's google login. at the first start it'll ask you some things like language, keyboard and so on... i write my password... and this is chrome os, on the left a launcher with icons, menu, search option and installed apps, and on the right you have the user menu, pc settings and the settings menu just like the usual chrome browser on pc, but there's something more here... there are selective options to synch the cloud,
which means you can choose to synch web history, bookmarks, passwords, settings, apps on this device with your laptop or android tablet... so, you could come here, connect with your google account from my chromebox and have your ideal desktop environment. really nothing bad to say... you can manage windows as you like, synch or move them... i'm using just one monitor but it can support two as well, with the mirroring feature or extended desktop. from this point of view it's all very easy and handy. file managing is a little different: this is file manager,
we have about 10 gb free for user's data, plus there's google drive up here, which is a sync offline as well with your account google, where you can keep photos, documents and such. back to my downloads, here i have some images... that's how it's displayed, it's all working offline... the same is for videos, this is one mp4, open in a different window, so you can have the video playing and maybe open the browser and keep doing other stuff. this kind of multitasking is actually well made and very useful.
the only fault is that the few kinds of not supported codec, for example ac3 audio, can't be added at this moment because there aren't other players... there's just one in the chrome web store, but it's no big deal. some of the apps down here can be used offline too, like google documents, google spreadsheet... the main apps we can say, while the others need web connectivity... actually many of them are just like dropbox, they're just shortcuts to the website, with no influence on the local file system. file managing is easy, you can add directories, move files...
i have the usb here, and i can move this image easily... you see, copy file... from this point of view it's all really simple and user friendly. chromebox plays fullhd videos without problems... here's youtube, this my nexus5 review, 1080p, full screen... it's really great. its limit -- after all we have just 2 gb of ram and a not so powerful processor -- is when you play three fullhd videos simultaneously... but well, that isn't such a big thing, it wasn't made for that. a limiting thing is also the lack of silverlight plug-in, then you can't use services such as skygo, or the new sky online.
another thing is that it's impossible to connect a local usb printer. it's all made with google print, so you'll need to have a printer connected to a laptop with windows or linux or whatever, and then you have to sign in and print with google cloud service. well, is there a way to get around this limits?yes, there are two ways to install linux. one is crouton, a script that allows you to install ubuntu into chromeos using a chroot environment and then move from one environment to the other using key combinations. this could allow you to use programs not installed on chromeos,
for example a ftp file manager, filezilla... i installed lxde, it works well, performance's good, because the hardware is more than enough for this os. the second way is a little more complicated, but it actually allows to install a dual boot or even totally remove chrome os and use only ubuntu or debian. well, that's all. please read the complete review on eeevolution.it, you'll find more technical details i couldn't show in this video. just let me say one last time how nice is this device:
it supports linux, it's quiet, it's cheap, it's simple and user friendly, it's complete...
though now it's available only in the u.s. , this chromebox -- soon there'll be a new model by hp -- is a very good product. stay tuned!
