I was lucky enough to win a Chromebook (Samsung Series 5 version) in a puzzle contest Google ran on their site, so mostly as a thankyou to Google and also for a few people that were interested, here's a few thoughts after using it for a week.
My first impression after opening the parcel was "it's tiny!", before realizing I was looking at the picture on the box. After removing the packaging it was a bit more like what I expected.
I won't focus too much on the hardware, but the Series 5 is a well built machine, if not particularly revolutionary. It's a bit heavy compared to a tablet, but light enough to carry around. The shiny black case has a clean look and the small Chrome logo adds a great final touch.
After turning on it asks for a few details like your Google login and Wifi details, then it's ready to go. I was pleased to see all my extensions from my Windows/Mac Chrome installs load up straight away and work exactly the same. If you use Chrome already then there's no big surprises in store.
There's a couple of Chrome features I'm missing, which is the ability to drag tabs side-by-side for comparing, and drag tabs between windows so they can be merged. I hope these are added soon.
I've been using it to do all my regular browsing without any problems, the only thing I really miss being Dropbox as I use this to transfer files my phone and other computers. The File API sounds like it could add Dropbox support, so I hope this comes soon.
It's a shame Google Music isn't out in the UK yet, because I haven't found a cloud alternative to Spotify that I really like, so I haven't been using it much for music.
Besides from those though, I don't particularly miss having native applications. That said, I haven't tried developing anything on it yet, which I think I'd find a more difficult transition (Google did make an excellent post and coding on Chrome OS though, which I will look into some more).
The battery life is amazing, in fact I haven't had to charge it yet after a few days use. My previous laptop can hardly last through a film, so this is my favourite thing about using it so far.
The Chromebook is a really handy thing to have around, and although I'm still reverting to my Windows 7 comfort zone for any lengthy computing, this could change over time. I think most people would get on just fine using one as their main computer and love the speed, simplicity and long battery life.
