Rant: Acer Chomebooks

 To start you should know two things: I love chromebooks and I have never trusted Acer.

  I have never met anyone who would buy a second Acer laptop. They work fine, but they are just not an experience that anyone really recommends. For something that you have to use everyday, it is just not worth it to own one. I was almost tricked into liking them again recently when I was able to test out a touchscreen super thing beautiful thing, that even includes gorilla glass, the almost unbreakable stuff, then Acer had to go make a chromebook.

 Chomebooks, if you don't know are relatively inexpensive computers that are everything the average user needs. They only have chrome as a browser and an operating system. Meaning for the people who use the internet, meaning everyone now a days, they are all you need. It takes a while for people to figure out what to use instead of Microsoft Office, but that is the only issue. If you are a photoshopper or programmer it isn't the best, but for most users it is more than they need and beautiful.

 The main kicker on why you would want a chromebook are these things: they are inexpensive, they should have solid state drives, they start super fast, they are simple and they look good:

Inexpensive is the only thing Acer did. They made a $200 laptop, which is amazing, but the Samsung one for $50 more is 100% worth it.

Acer did not include a solid state drive, meaning that instead of eight second start up time, it is pushed back to at least 20 seconds. That isn't even a hibernate recovery, that is full boot. I know 12 seconds doesn't seem too long, but it is taking away from the experience. Also if you drop it, the Acer hard drive will scratch making it unusable. Solid state drives are so much more children friendly.

The look of the Acer chromebook is not up to par. The Samsung one just is beautiful without a doubt, reminiscent of a Macbook Air. The Acer chomebook looks like a laptop from the 1990s, with all the ports to boot. It is just ugly.

Mostly I am just sad that Google would put the Acer chromebook in their Play Store. That laptop is just not the experience that people who buy a chromebook should have, and I don't understand why Google would endorse that.

Rant: Google on the iPhone

I am a google fan. I have a cr-48 ChromeOS Notebook that I have almost been converted to. I have a google tv which is amazing except when the remote freezes, but I have not been happy with almost any google iPhone apps, and I have tried them all. List hear what I think of them all.

Google Mobile App: The voice search is okay, but not enough to make me want to open this and then maybe have to switch to Safari after, it just isn't a smooth transition. It has push notifications for gmail, which is just weird. The great feature here is Google Goggles, which should be its own app, I would actually use it if I didn't have to go through that app.

Google Earth: I just don't know how to use this. I keep it to occasionally get GPS locations for geocaching, but there isn't really a real use.

Google Voice: This is the app I have been most excited for. I even bought a third party one for a while, I used work around and anything I could for almost a year. The one thing this brought was push notifications. That is awesome, except the app itself is sub par. Half the time when I try to type a text it will update, hiding the text box under the keyboard, and then when I try to edit the box after, it just deletes everything. It has problems in anything but the best of internet, and just generally is lame. I use it because of the push notifications, and the calling feature actually works, but if there was something better I would probably switch.

Google Latitude: Cool idea, just no one uses it, and it doesn't integrate well with things. I wanted it for so long, then when it finally came out it was just meh.

There are others, Google Books, I haven't tried much, Google Authenticator, I don't understand, and Google Places, which I have now, but haven't started using it much.

All in all, I don't like the soft blue look of all their apps, they don't integrate, and I still don't have a remote for my google tv. I know I shouldn't complain because they are all free, but it you have a product make it good.

I think I was just mad about how the google voice app just didn't work 3 out of the last 5 times I wanted it to. I now switch to my laptop to text most the time because it isn't worth the hassle of using the app. The Chrome extension for Google Voice is amazing and one of the reasons I cannot go back to Firefox.

Thanks google for doing okay, but get an iPhone App department that actually uses iPhones.