Review: Samsung Chromebook Series 5

Cloud computing is supposedly the future, but PCs and mobile devices have thus far remained overwhelmingly dependent on local hardware for data storage and processing. We’ve had to wait for Chrome OS to finally arrive – on the Samsung Chromebook Series 5 – for a product that embraces the concept in its purest form.

Chrome OS eschews local processing power in favour of online applications running through the Chrome web browser. Indeed, the browser is your only interface to the OS: it isn’t even possible to install other applications beyond browser plug-ins. It’s the web or nothing.

Living in the cloud

You may baulk at going without your regular desktop applications, but at the Chrome Web Store you’ll find web-based ways to achieve most computing tasks, as well as gateways to web content, downloadable themes and a good selection of games. These install as Chrome Apps – half-bookmarks, half-extensions that can not only take you directly to the relevant site but also install extra services in Chrome OS (see Hooking up).

And although the Chrome OS concept relies on an internet connection, many third-party applications can be used offline, using HTML 5’s new offline storage features. Offline versions of Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs are promised by late summer.

Strength in simplicity

The minimal model has several advantages. The OS boots in fewer than ten seconds – we timed 6.7 seconds to the login screen – and resumes from hibernation in two seconds flat, giving something close to the instant-on experience of a tablet.

The simple design also makes it easy for Google to trickle out frequent updates, as it does with the Chrome browser. It’s promised that every Chrome OS device will automatically gain new features over time, potentially including improvements to performance and battery life.

And because everything in Chrome OS runs within the browser, it’s sandboxed by default. Indeed, Google says the Chromebook needs no antivirus software – a bold claim, but one that’s backed up by a TPM-authenticated boot sequence. Certainly Chrome OS is far more difficult to hijack than Windows or OS X.

It’s arguably better for data security, too. Since your data lives in the cloud, you won’t lose it if your Chromebook is lost or stolen. All that’s held on the Chromebook’s tiny 16GB SSD is caches and settings – and even these are encrypted, so without your password a thief can’t access any information at all. You, meanwhile, can simply pick up another Chromebook, enter your credentials and carry on working.

There are downsides to the Chrome OS model, though, especially for business use. Transmitting your information back and forth leaves you vulnerable to packet-sniffing attacks; and should your host suffer a hacker attack, you’re helpless. A service outage could leave you unable to work at all. And we doubt IT departments will be keen to support a platform that automatically patches itself with no local management.

The hardware

The Chromebook Series 5 hardware adopts a simple design, to complement the new OS. The battery is internal, the RAM isn’t upgradeable and the hard disk isn’t accessible either – although you can get at the mSATA SSD slot if you unscrew the backplate.

Look around the edges and you’ll also notice there’s no wired Ethernet port, nor HDMI – only one mini-VGA output (the adapter is in the box), a single 3.5mm audio in/out socket and a SIM slot, enabling the 3G model to access a mobile internet connection. You get two USB 2 sockets and an SD card reader, but these aren’t as useful as you might expect (see Practicalities).

Turn to the keyboard and you’ll notice that, in place of function keys, the Chromebook has a row of navigation and control buttons. At the left, instead of Caps Lock, there’s a dedicated search key. The outsized trackpad measures a generous 116mm across the diagonal, allowing you to sweep across the full width of the screen in one movement. You can scroll up and down web pages with a two-finger drag, but Chrome OS doesn’t currently support swiping left and right to navigate between pages.

A final nice touch is the lid sensor: the Chromebook automatically powers on as soon as you open it up, and hibernates when you close it. It’s a little thing, but it helps the Chromebook feel quick and simple.

Hooking up

The Chromebook Series 5 has two USB ports; but there’s no way in Chrome OS to install new device drivers, so you can only connect pre-supported devices. That includes USB mice and keyboards, and approved wired Ethernet adapters. But you can forget about complicated items such as TV tuners or printers: if you want to print out a web page from Chrome OS, you’ll have to use Google’s roundabout Cloud Print service to send it via a different computer.

The main use for the USB sockets – such as the SD card slot, for example – is for connecting external storage. The Chrome OS file browser can view, play and queue the most common file types, including PDFs, pictures, music and videos, although high bit-rate HD files may stutter. Chrome Apps can also register services for specific file types: for example, once you’ve installed Picasa, the next time you connect a drive containing JPEG files, you’ll see the option to upload them to Picasa.

We found Chrome OS fussy about disk formats, though. NTFS volumes are officially supported, but only freshly formatted FAT32 media worked for us. And the browser is rudimentary: you can’t search, edit or organise your files without first uploading them to a remote service. Nor is there any way to connect to shared resources on your home network. It’s clear that, for Google, support for local files is a low priority.

The practicalities

Although the Chromebook is comparatively cheap, it feels like a high-quality laptop. Its slim chassis is sturdy and stylish, and the keyboard feels supremely spacious and solid. The matte 12.1in LED screen offers a comfortable 1,280 x 800 resolution, and a bright, sharp image – although colours are rather cold and muted.

And with its super-lightweight OS and 2GB of DDR3 RAM, the Chromebook feels terrifically snappy, scrolling around and flicking between browser tabs at lightning speed. The placement of the navigation keys at the top of the keyboard isn’t exactly convenient, but overall it’s a pleasure to use.

The Chromebook’s actual usefulness, though, depends on what you want to do. For basic web browsing, the screen and keyboard are perfect, and the built-in webcam and microphone make it suitable for VoIP and chat applications too.

Battery life isn’t bad, either: Samsung promises eight hours of light use, and one charge was enough to happily get us through a day of casual browsing, so long as we remembered to put the lid down between sessions. Impressively, we were able to enjoy just over five hours of full-screen iPlayer playback on a full charge, and although the Chromebook's integrated speakers are nowhere near hi-fi quality, they were loud and clear enough for us to enjoy the show. It all adds up to a tempting alternative to a regular netbook, for a modest price premium.

Limitations

For a more general-purpose role, though, the Chromebook is uncomfortable. It isn’t only the loss of physical ownership of your data that’s unnerving. The problem is that current web-based applications are almost invariably poor cousins of the desktop applications we’re used to: compare, for example, Microsoft’s web-based Office applications to their native counterparts, or even to the free LibreOffice suite. Chrome OS also lacks runtimes for Java or Silverlight. Working in Chrome OS thus ends up feeling like an endless series of compromises.

The Atom processor doesn’t help, either. Although the OS itself flies along, Flash games and in-browser videos tend to stutter. Angry Birds online won’t run smoothly in HD mode, YouTube struggles with 720p movies, and full-screen video from BBC iPlayer looks sticky even at standard definition. Browser benchmarks confirm that for any task more taxing than basic browsing, the Chromebook is precisely as ponderous as a regular Windows or Linux-based netbook.

A secondary source of unease is Chrome OS’s reliance on an internet connection. Google is negotiating a contract-free, pay-as-you-go data plan to accompany the 3G Chromebook, so you need never be out of coverage. But the smoothness of your experience will always depend on the speed and stability of your connection – not an idea that fills us with confidence, especially given the state of Britain’s 3G internet services.

And if you were thinking of dual-booting a more mainstream OS alongside Chrome OS, you may be out of luck: the Chromebook simply won’t boot from an external drive, at least not officially.

Verdict

The Chromebook hardware is a joy to use, and it’s exciting to see a new operating system take its first steps. But the overall package isn’t compelling enough to persuade us to give up our familiar applications and ways of working.

The platform certainly has potential. The usability gap between online and local applications is constantly dwindling, and Chrome OS itself will only get better.

Right now, though, the applications simply aren’t there to support the Chromebook – and nor, arguably, is the network coverage. In a year or two the Chromebook could make a very attractive personal computing platform, but for now we’d recommend you hold off.

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Microsoft unveils second preview of IE10

Microsoft has unveiled the second platform preview for IE10, unveiling better support for HTML5 and new security features.

Internet Explorer 9 only came out in March, and IE10 is still in the early stages of development. Microsoft is releasing so-called "platform previews", which show the latest additions to the browser's engine without any of the user interface laid on top, as it did with IE9.

The second platform preview includes HTML5-based drag and drop to move files, support for HTML5 forms, and CSS3 positioned floats, which will allow text to flow around images on the screen.

Improvements to parsing behaviour will mean developers can write code once and have it work the same across all browsers, according to Microsoft. Ryan Gavin, senior director of Internet Explorer business and marketing, said Microsoft was working on "very deep HTML5 support with an ear toward interoperability and a vision we call 'same markup' where the developer can write the code once and have it work across browsers and work across the web".

IE10 will also feature a new sandboxing tool, which prevents third-party elements, such as maps, from accessing the rest of the data on a page.

"HTML5 sandboxing... essentially allows you to specify controls about what content running in an iFrame can do. For example, pop-up a window, execute JavaScript," Rob Mauceri, partner group program manager for Internet Explorer, told PC Pro. "By default those things are locked down and it lets the developer keep the page safe."

Hardware acceleration

Microsoft's developers are also working on moving more background work away from the browser, making use of hardware acceleration. The company is working on supporting the new Web Worker spec, which offloads heavier burdens - such as complex JavaScript - to run in the background.

"A casual game could choose to run the logic for the computer player in the game in a Web Worker while the user is interacting with the game," Mauceri explained.

However, Microsoft said the way Web Worker shares data across pages raises privacy concerns, which it has passed on to the W3C standards body.

The next platform preview will be released in eight to 12 weeks.

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Legal team ditches claimant in Facebook case

The legal team supporting a man who claims to have a substantial stake in Facebook has bailed out of the case, casting the future of the suit into doubt.

New York wood-pellet salesman Paul Ceglia has claimed he is entitled to half of Mark Zuckerberg's multibillion-dollar stake in the social network as payment for work he did establishing the site.

Ceglia received a boost when DLA Piper took on his case, because the high-profile firm gave the claim credibility – as did claims by the lawyers that Ceglia had passed lie-detector tests to show the veracity of his stake.

However, the law firm has withdrawn from the case, for reasons unknown, and is not willing or able to discuss the details of its decision to quit.

"Due to our attorney-client privilege obligations, there will be no further comment," the firm said in a statement made to the LA Times

His case has been taken on by San Diego's Jeffrey Lake. Facebook has previously slammed the case, saying in court documents that Ceglia was "a career scam artist with a proven track record of falsifying documents and ripping off innocent people".

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Review: Microsoft Office 365

PREVIEW: Purchasing and maintaining software for a business, small or big, is a costly undertaking. It isn’t just the licensing that affects your bottom line, but the man hours that go into keeping software patched and up to date, installing it on new machines and maintaining all the servers you need to provide email and online services.

Microsoft’s Office 365, the public beta of which was unveiled this week, aims to make the job easier. It’s the successor to the current Business Productivity Online Services, and shifts a raft of traditionally office-based products and services from the server room to the cloud.

Included are Microsoft Exchange with Forefront Online Protection for anti-virus and spam, SharePoint, Lync Online and the Office Web Apps with (optional) licences for the full Office Professional Plus, plus a SharePoint-based public website.

It can be used in two ways: alone as an online replacement for email, unified communication and file-sharing that delivers the full Office feature set as it was designed to work; or federated with your existing on-premise servers to give you the same level of control and configuration with far less management and maintenance.

For an enterprise it promises convenience, for a small business it’s far cheaper and simpler than buying and managing a server. But how much of the on-premise server power do you get and is it ready for businesses to rely on?

Features and tools

To end users, Office 365 means extra features. By combining Exchange, Lync Online and SharePoint servers (something not every business has the wherewithal, time or money to do) Office 365 unlocks the full Office 2010 feature set.

Features such as getting a warning that someone’s out of the office when typing an email address, and being able to see the person who made a change to one of your documents is online so you can ask them what they meant in an IM or video call, aren’t available with an Exchange server alone. And there’s a whole raft of other features worth having.

These include being able to attach a link to a shared file so you don’t end up with five sets of comments to read and merge; to take shared files offline and automatically upload and merge changes when you get back to the office; and turn email replies into a database automatically.

Administrators will also benefit from going down the Office 365 route. Setting up Exchange, Lync Online and SharePoint servers can be a prohibitively expensive and complicated process, and requires ongoing management.

Signing up and signing in for Office 365 is simple, and takes you straight to an online management console. This covers the settings for the service, subscription management for Office 365 accounts and Office client licences, which you can allocate individually or by AD role or using specific policies.

It also displays service health, with warnings for any scheduled maintenance and wizards for creating migration and co-existence plans. All this makes moving to Office 365 a clear and manageable process.

If you’ve used the web management tools for Exchange Server, these are identical but with many of the management features for Forefront, SharePoint and (to a lesser extent) Lync. You can use a limited number of PowerShell management commands too.

The vast majority of server features you need are presented in an easy-to-manage manner, from laying out SharePoint sites to sophisticated options for auditing and ediscovery, and this includes the ability to create a central metadata store to normalise key business and technical terms in SharePoint libraries to improve index and search.

The tools for managing mobile devices are particularly useful, allowing you to set policies such as forced encryption, block devices that don’t accept policies, and remotely wipe lost devices, including iPads.

Other tools allow you to redelegate a vanity domain, so internal Office 365 resources look like they’re on your own domain instead of ‘mydomain.onmicrosoft.com’, and to migrate your existing email domain to Office 365.

You can use ADFS (Active Directory federation services) for true single sign-on, which means the same password can be used to sign into client PCs, Office 365, email, SharePoint and Lync.

This even works with SBS 2011 Essentials – an excellent complement to Office 365 for small businesses, giving you Active Directory and local backup. It’s also easy to give business partners access to specific SharePoint sites; users can just email them a link.

What’s missing

There are a number of pieces missing, however, at this early stage. Tools for partners to manage Office 365 for customers are coming, for instance, but these aren’t in this beta. The Business Data Catalog (for viewing data from line-of-business applications) isn’t there because Microsoft is still working on how to guarantee data privacy.

The biggest hole is full integration with voice. Lync gives you voice and video conversations through the desktop client, but you can’t yet give out one number that routes to the desktop, mobile or deskphone as you move around.

You don’t get Exchange’s voice mail search, either, and there’s no mobile Lync client for any platform. Microsoft doesn’t plan to provide voice telephone services itself. Instead it will partner with existing voice providers who can integrate their services with Office 365, and these won’t arrive for about a year.

Lync Online, meanwhile, has the fewest management tools of all the services. Although you can control domain federation to allow connections to Lync users at companies you partner with, using blacklists or whitelists, you currently also need to add a Lync Online hosting provider to on-premise Lync servers to make this work. We expect Microsoft to push out a Lync update to correct this before the service comes out of beta.

More limiting is the lack of federation with public IM services. Lync only lets you chat with Windows Live users, not AOL and Yahoo users and certainly not Google users (there’s no XMPP support).

Conclusion

Assuming Office 365 has the same level of reliability as BPOS, at this price it could be hard to make a case for on-premise mail servers unless your business is regulated. The inclusion of Lync Online and SharePoint are the icing on the cake.

Indeed, Office 365 looks set to become a credible business cloud service, and one that will make sense for a lot of businesses that can find better things to do with their IT time and budget than running an Exchange server.

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Microsoft releases SP1 for Office 2010

Microsoft has released the first service pack for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

The SP1 for Office includes all the updates shipped since the products were launched last year. The SharePoint service pack will cover updates released up until April and Microsoft will also release a cumulative update to cover those released since.

Aside from the previously released updates and bug fixes, the service pack includes an update to Office Web Applications, following the launch of Office 365, and adds support for that cloud-based system to Outlook 2010.

SharePoint 2010 will also now officially support Google Chrome.

"The SP1 release is important because it provides us with an opportunity to address customer feedback as well as the security, stability and performance of our 2010 wave of products," Microsoft said in a blog post.

The service packs are already available from the Microsoft here, and will arrive as an automatic update in 90 days.

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Microsoft: Office 365 will lift SMBs' tech "burden"

Microsoft unveiled Office 365 today, targeting it at SMBs that are "burdened" by technology.

The cloud-based system brings together Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync, offering online collaboration tools and offline capabilities on a per user subscription basis.

Enterprises were hardly mentioned at the launch event in London, however, with Microsoft focusing on the benefits to SMBs.

Microsoft brought out Doug Richards, an investor from TV show Dragon's Den, who suggested technology didn't benefit many small businesses. “If you run a large business, technology is a potential competitive advantage,” he said.

“If you’re a small business, technology is a burden,” he added, suggesting tech was something SMBs had to do just to keep up, rather than create real business advantages.

The managing director for Microsoft UK, Gordon Frazer, agreed, saying “the advent of cloud computing, in practical ways, establishes ways for small businesses to compete with big businesses”.

In fact, Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president for Lync, suggested Office 365 could even give SMBs an edge over larger competitors, as they won't need to worry about upgrades and will always have the latest features.

Of course, there are other products on the market that allow SMBs to work via the cloud - notably Google Apps.

Microsoft repeatedly said businesses needed to work when an internet connection wasn't available - not least thanks to the UK's faltering broadband network - and claimed Office 365 worked better offline than competitors.

Data security and reliability

Microsoft revealed a few other details about how the system works. All data from European companies will be held in the EU, at Microsoft's Amsterdam or Dublin datacentres, but the company confirmed that it would still be subject to US laws, so would have to hand over data if requested by authorities.

Frazer said Microsoft couldn't guarantee that it would never have to hand over data to the US - and "neither can anyone else" registered in the US.

Office 365 product manager Gill Le Fevre said reliability was key to the service's success. "The best technology in the world isn't anything if our customers can't access it or don't have faith in it,"

"We put our money where our mouth is. Our approach is that if we fail in our delivery, we give you money back," she said. "I see in my revenue results every month... the money we've physically handed back, and I'm happy to say we haven't seen it that often."

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Google targets "broken" Facebook with social tools

Google has unveiled Google+, which the company claims will offer a more private, personalised social network.

Google has failed with social projects in the past, notably with Buzz, but the company wants another crack at social advertising dollars and has laid out plans for a Facebook rival.

The company claimed Google+ would be more flexible and privacy focused than Facebook, with several thinly-veiled criticisms of the largest social network.

“Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online,” said Vic Gundotra, senior vice president for engineering. “Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

The more users Facebook gets, the harder it gets for Google to steal those

“Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it,” he said.

Whether Google can crack the dominance of Facebook might depend on better privacy, which has been a bugbear with Facebook. “For us, privacy isn't buried six panels deep," Google said.

Not easy to topple Facebook

Even with privacy enhancements, Google will find it difficult to drag customers away from Facebook, according to analysts. “Enticing consumers to join another social networking service will not be easy," said Rory Maher, an analyst with Hudson Square Research, told the Reuters news agency.

"It's going to have an uphill battle due to Facebook's network effects," said Maher. "The more users Facebook gets, the harder it gets for Google to steal those." But he added that Google's popularity in search and email could help it gain a following.

Google+ will be available on Android Market and the mobile web from today - although only those with an invite will be able to login - and will be rolled out to desktop users in the coming days and weeks.

In the meantime, here's a rundown of the key features:

+Circles

A tool for dividing friends into groups to make it clear who gets to see what. Like Facebook's Groups option, +Circles means users can differentiate their online profile between different contacts – such as family, college friends and work colleagues.

+Sparks

The company says “Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content”. The system enables users to enter their interests and then receive feeds for sharing and commenting on stories and content related to those subjects.

+Hangouts

Described by Google as a combination of casual meetings with live multi-person video, +Hangouts is designed to mirror social experiences such as the pub, where groups of people can drop in and chat in a semi-private forum.

+Mobile

Includes location services for pinpointing where people are, and an automatic picture upload service to the cloud.

+Huddle

A more instant approach for staying in touch, Google describes Huddle as a “messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what's going on, right this second”. The company say this should make it easier to organise meetings and make plans without access to everyone's diaries.

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