If you want a Windows laptop, get a Windows laptop. But, if you want an easy-to-use, Web-based laptop, consider getting a Chromebook. So long as you realize that the Samsung Series 5 and its brother from another company, the Acer Chromebook, is not a full-featured Windows or Linux notebook computer you’ll be fine.

So it is that I’m pretty happy with my brand new Samsung Series 5 3G even though CNET gave it a just “ok” rating pending software improvements. While neither Chromebook will be generally available until June 15th, I was able to get my hands on one a week early. I’ve been working with mine for several days now and this is what I’ve found.

Hardware:

The Samsung Series 5 comes with a matte 12.1-inch display. It’s powered by an Intel Atom N570 dual-core CPU running at 1.66Ghz, has 2GBs of RAM, and a 16GB solid state drive (SSD). For graphics, it uses an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150.

On the netbook sized system’s left side you’ll find a headset/mic jack, with a USB 2.0 port and a proprietary port for a VGA dongle hidden behind a plastic door. The second USB port and a SIM card slot hide behind plastic door on the right side. In the front you’ll find a card reader that can handle SD, SDHC, SDXC , or MMC cards. At the top of the display, it also has a video-camera.

Under the hood, there’s a 3G radio and 802.11n Wi-Fi. You’ll need one or the other of these because the Samsung doesn’t have an Ethernet port.

There’s also no Bluetooth. I can live without an Ethernet port, but the lack of Bluetooth bugs me. The Samsung, to me, screams to be used with a Bluetooth headset.

On the other hand, The keyboard, while not back-lit, boasts large, well-spaced out keys. Although larger than most netbooks, many laptops have abysmal keyboards. I found the Samsung Series 5 keyboard to be the next best thing to my gold standard for keyboards: the Lenovo ThinkPad’s keyboards.

That said, this is not your normal keyboards. It has no function keys and the delete key is also missing in action. Instead, it duplicates some of this functionality with keyboard shortcuts.

That’s great as far as it goes, but the Chromebook doesn’t have any documentation to speak of so finding the Chromebook keyboard shortcuts can be a pain. The keyboard combo “Ctrl-Alt-?” will show you keyboard overlay that shows most, but not all, of the keyboard shortcuts. For example, Ctrl-M, which opens up the file manager, isn’t to be seen on the overlay.

The touchpad is good-sized and I was able to work with it without much trouble. I say this as someone who hates touchpads. Give me a mouse or the ThinkPad’s pointer any day of the week. The touchpad is capable of multi-touch gestures, but two-finger scrolling is the only one that’s currently supported.

The battery life is remarkable. I’ve used my Chromebook constantly for up to ten plus hours and I’ve yet to bring it under 10% of remaining battery life. I’ve finally found a laptop that, provided my plane had Wi-Fi, I could use constantly over a trans-Atlantic flight.

I could also use that long on my lap comfortably. The Samsung runs cooler than any other laptop or netbook I’ve ever used and at a bit over three-pounds it’s quite light for its size.

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