Six months with the Samsung Chromebook

It has been close to six months since I got my Samsung Exynos (ARM) powered Chromebook.
I've been using quite a bit lately and have some time to reflect on using it.

The same criticism I had in the beginning still hold true. The device is still very limited in what you can do with it. However, it's strengths are the reason I still use it.

Living with Chrome OS

I've been trying to wrap my head around the idea of going cloud-only. Supposedly, it is the future of computing and there are many strong advocates of Chrome OS. I've been playing with my two Chromebooks and my opinion is still the same. It will be a long time before the majority of us go cloud-only.

Here are some anecdotes  of my life with Chrome OS and Chromebooks.

Acer C7 Chromebook Quick Review

So I ended up getting an Acer C7 Chromebook. It was $122 refurb so I figured why not.

The Acer C7 Chromebook (C710-2847) is basically a rebadged, re-worked 11.6 netbook running Chrome OS. It is based off the Acer Aspire V5-171. Acer didn't do much to the design except swap out a few keyboard labels.

It is as boring as it gets. 11.6" screen with piss poor viewing angles and an anemic battery life of 3 hours. Did I mention I got it for $122? That is the saving grace. The chassis is made of the cheapest tupperware plastic that can be found yet it manages to pull down 3 pounds in weight. This is a half pound heaver than the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook.

So how does it compare to the Samsung's ARM based Chromebook? See below.

Generally speaking, the Acer is much faster due to the fact it is running an INTEL processor. There are various benchmarks showing the speed advantage of the Acer. It also has three USB ports, a VGA port, HDMI, and an 10/100 ethernet. The Samsung model lacks the ethernet, one less USB and does without the VGA. I can see the advantage to having the onboard ethernet for some scenarios.

Also, because it runs on an X86 platform, it has a much wider selection of INTEL only applications like VNC Viewer which is unavailable on the Samsung.

Another advantage to the Acer is it the fact it has a 320GB storage. That may or may not be important to you but with 320GB, you can probably store quite a few MP4 movies for local playback. Hence, the Acer isn't a total disaster. It is also much more upgrade-able. You can easily up the RAM cheaply and this makes it a decent UBUNTU portable netbook if you are so inclined to go that route. The 3 hour battery life can be fixed with a larger 6, 9 cell battery that you can buy later on.

However, I would still pick the Samsung over the Acer. The Samsung has a better fit-n-finish. The screen, keyboard, and trackpads are much better. The keyboard on the Samsung has better travel and the trackpad operates with less glitches than the Acer. The Acer also heats up under use. The Samsung can be used on a lap while lounging whereas the Acer gets warm after a few minutes. Lastly, out-of-the-box, the Samsung has a better runtime of 6-7 hours.

So there you have it. My short take on the Acer C7 Chromebook. Did I mention I got it for  $122!

USB dongle for Samsung Chromebook

I can confirm the Apple USB 2.0 10/100 Ethernet dongle works fine with the ARM base Samsung Chromebook. It is a plug-n-play affair. Unfortunately, my gigabit ASIX dongles don't work yet.
So if you want a wired connection, you know where to start.

Samsung Chromebook notebook review

Despite my misgivings, I broke down and got myself a Samsung Chromebook. Pictured above and stacked on top of my 15" Macbook Retina Pro, the Chromebook is tiny!

It is a basically a web browser using the internals of a mobile tablet in an 11" netbook form factor. I got it because I wanted to see if I could be cloud-only. Short answer, "hell no."  However, the free 100GB of cloud storage for two years pretty much pays for the device. I also wanted to play with ARM running a polished desktop OS (yes, I consider Chrome OS a real OS albeit different). And lastly, it makes a good computer for the guest room.

Read my end user review for my impressions on this device.

Waiting for Chromebook refresh

Rumor has it that there will be a new, updated quad-core Exynos Samsung Chromebook announced at Google I/O in the next few weeks.

I've been really tempted to get the current one for tinkering. Why? Why not. I am not interesting in cheap x86 netbooks you can get for the same price. Sure, a few of you can point to some nice 11.6 ASUS touchscreen ones for a few bucks more. Moreover, I already have enough laptops lying around. What interests me is the ARM architecture; running anything but INTEL. I really just want a super light-weight, portable, long battery device to do some MySQL work locally. I'm currently using an iPad w/ keyboard SSH remotely. It works but I prefer to run something locally.

I don't know if I could deal with just Chrome OS. I've been playing with it under VM and I can't see myself using it full time even with developer mode and cruoton. I've also been paying attention to the latest Linux kernel support and running Linux on those books in general. Things are progressing to a point where full-time ARM linux desktop is viable.

Lets see! I may pop for one in the next few weeks. If the new one is compelling, I may get it. If not, I', heading over Best Buy to get the current one open-box at discount. They get a high return rate so there are plenty of open-box returns at great prices.

Samsung shamelessly copies IOS Passport

Ok, Let me get this straight. Many companies have "digital wallet" apps and features. I'm OK with that but let me share something with you guys.


Here we have Google's and Microsoft's digital wallet icons.

Now we have Apple's passbook and Samsung's new "Wallet" service.

Let me think. Someone in Korea thinks that a blacked squared bevelled stiched, leather pouch, with angled passes; including a movie ticket, plane ticket, and coffee ticket using the colors blue,green and yellow is the only obvious way to design an wallet icon.

This has been the line of defense. " There are so many different ways you can design an icon and obviously, this is the only way to design a wallet icon!"

Even some Android blogs, including Android Authority, thinks it is rather shameless.

Samsungs' Massive advertising budget

If you think Apple is a marketing machine, you will be completely surprised by this chart.

Samsung spent more this year than Apple, Dell , HP in the last four years combined.
Think about it. It is also bigger than Apple, HP, Dell, Microsoft and Coca Cola combined.

Wow, I did not know that. No wonder there are so many S3s flooding the market.


Source: Business Insider , CNNMoney, Cost of Selling Galaxies.

Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter (STAE121) review w/ Samsung 830 SSD

This is another web review of the GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter. Here is a short summary: It is SMOKING FAST.

After accumulating over 7 or so 2.5" Seagate GoFlex drives, I decided to take one of these for a spin.
I love the idea of the GoFlex and I've been happy with mix and matching drives (USB2, USB3, and Firewire 800 connectors).

With 8 SATA6 SSDs lying around, Thunderbolt was the next logical step to take advantage of them. If you've been reading my blog, I've tried everything with my SSDs - enclosing them in eSATA RAID enclosures, chaining up in striped RAID over USB 3.0, and other means of squeezing out the most performance externally. Now, I've given up and have gone Thunderbolt and for good reasons. With an SSD, it is fast (scroll to the bottom).


Go-Flex adapters have SATA on one end and a connector (usually USB) on the other. This one is slightly larger with a bottom base (to house the Thunderbolt electronics). The great thing is that they will also work with any 2.5" standard SATA drives found in laptops and this includes SSDs.

Here it is pictured next to a USB 3.0 Go-Flex adapter.

Furthermore, I should note, the expensive Thunderbolt cable is not included and you will need to source one before using this adapter.

As for speed, you won't be terribly impressed with the adapter using  a standard HDD drive. The normal  Go-Flex 1 TB drives run at 5400 rpm so they will perform as fast as a drive connected internally.

First of all, with the standard a standard 1TB Go-Flex drives, I was getting some 80MB/s read and write using BlackMagic's speed tesk. These aren't that better over a standard connection like USB 3.0.

USB 3.0 yielded slightly slower benchmarks that you won't notice too much in real world situations.

You will need SSDs to see how wonderful Thunderbolt really is. I paired up some Samsung 830 128GB SSDs to both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 to see how they performed.

 

Here are some preliminary results:

Using Thunderbolt, you will see in excess of 300 MB/s reads and writes. 360 MB/s read was normal after several runs.

Now here is USB 3.0 speed for reference and comparison. 180-200 MB/s write and reads. Clearly, Thunderbolt is superior.

Synthetic benchmarks is one thing. What matter how will it perform in the real world. My typical use case would be  copying large files like virtual machines, system clones, and large media files.

For my test, I copied a 30GB Vmware VMDK file from my boot drive which is a M4 512GB SSD capable of 500 MB/s reads.


From my internal 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs to SSD via USB.
2:24.7

From my internal 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs to a Samsung 830 SSD using Thunderbolt.
1:31:3

63% faster with Thunderbolt.

Now lets compare with a standard 7200 rpm drive connected directly to my notebook on the fastest SATA6 bus.

From my internal 512GB Crucial M4 SSDs to a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 7200 rpm drive.
7:46.8

If you are not using SSDs, expect your time to be 10-12 minutes with standard hard drives.

In another test, I copied a 6GB Windows 7 VM image on to the SSD. Total time to copy was 12 seconds. Booting from the same Virtualized image of Windows 7  off a Thunderbolt SSD took 11.3 seconds to boot to the log in screen. This is faster than most of the computers on my company's network. Let repeat that again. It took 11.3 seconds to boot a virtualized Windows.

There you have it. Thunderbolt is smoking fast. Thunderbolt vs USB 3.0. There is no contest.
It totally obliterates USB 3.0. More importantly, Thunderbolt now makes external bootable drives a reality. You can safely boot off an external drive with little or no performance penalty. In some cases, the external Thunderbolt boot drive will be faster than the internal drive as it is in the case of my 27' iMac which still uses a regular hard drive.


I will update this blog later as I get two more high performance Thunderbolt drives : LaCie Big 2 and Drobo 5D in the coming days.

Goodbye Galaxy Nexus, Hello iPhone 5

Goodbye Galaxy Nexus, Hello iPhone 5.

I'm about to retire my GNexus to secondary status and I'm glad to.
The phone has been a terrible mess from day one. I was mistaken to believe a "Nexus"  product would get updates and fixes but Verizon pretty much screwed the whole thing up from day one.

I got  the official Jelly Bean the other day and it hasn't fix anything. I still get 3-4 hour battery life and most of the core apps don't work for me. I know this is Verizon's fault because I've played with other VZW Nexus phones with rooted ROMS and they perform much better than stock VZW. Jelly Bean still lags on Verizon GNEX phones. The camera app on Jelly Bean on VZW is atrocious compared to other GNEX phones with different roms.

Unfortunately, as a manager, I need to set a good example and I simply just can't root and experiment with an employer issued phone.

I'm back with the iPhone and I'm happy. I love the great apps that help me get my work done. iSSH, Screens (VNC/Apple Remote Desktop), Texstatic, various superior MySQL clients, and  X11 apps.
PUSH IMAP w/ IDLE works  with Cyrus/PostFix/Dovecot mail servers along with MD5-CRAM SSL authentication works on the iPhone. I don't use GMAIL so I need to make sure my PUSH emails from Nagios is working 100%. CalDAV with PUSH notifications and event .ics calendars work out of the box with iOS. More importantly, Cisco VPN w/ Group Authentication works since day one. Google still hasn't really figured out how to fix this and a smartphone is useless to me if I can't VPN/SSH into my work.

Lastly, the most important thing is MTP. MTP works  5% of the time. 95% of the time is is pure frustration. The GNEX has been a pain to transfer files. I've been using webdav, samba, ftp to get files into my Nexus. MTP client on Mountain Lion broke in 10.8.1. I can't get MTP working reliably with Ubuntu 12.04, CentOS or Linux Mint. I'll get it working but something will break it like an update to GMTP or Fuse. PPTP is really slow and web/ftp/sftp isn't going to cut it. I've tried various PPAs, FSTAB, manually mounting and it will work for a bit and then drop. When I plug in my Galaxy Tablet, it goes kaput again. Even when it does work, it never worked reliably. Files take forever to transfer and often get corrupted.

iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 mounts on Linux with no hassle. In fact, with a clean install of Linux Mint 13, I didn't have to do anything but plug in the cable. The App folders mounted and I could copy my files. I transferred about 20GB of MKV, WMV videos to the various video player apps I have. Large PDFs (120-300MB) and 60MB Excel files transfer without a hiccup. As you can see below, Linux Mint has no problems mounting an iPhone 5.

Lot of Android fans will tell you they will deal with all these frustrations because of the customization and flexibility of Android. I don't change home launchers, add widgets, apply different skins on my phones. Both my phones, I can play MKV and different video codecs, mount network volumes, run emulators and do pretty much the same thing. I do like the fact you can completely swap out a ROM distros. There are also some killer applications on Android that I like like Torque (iOS equivalent is pretty pricey). You can also run chroot Linux but I have never been a fan of the implementation on Android.

I have a different set of needs in terms of customization. For me, customization is the ability to install a great app like Vmware Vsphere client to manage my ESXI server. Customization is the ability to pull a sd card from my new Olympus OM-D micro 4/3 camera and edit 1080p video of my vacation. iMovie is truly amazing and has changed how I edit my home videos. I no longer need to use Final Cut for simple things like a picnic or music recital. Customization is also the ability to sort out my pictures in my picture album without manually renaming my jpegs 1.jpg,2.jpg,3.jpg just to have them display in a certain order. It is the little things I appreciate. There is still no peer to the iPod player on the iPhone.

The iPhone 5 is really fast. At work, we are developing a spreadsheet HTML5 web application that is javascript/ajax heavy and the iPhone 5 loads up the application with no problem.
The various Android devices we have have been choking on these pages (200 plus divs with over 100 concurrent ajax calls).  The benchmarks (Anandtech) have shown iOS6 and the A6 SoC has a super fast Javascript engine. I'm surprised because Google's V8 has always been better than Apple's Nitro Javascript engine.

The GNEX still has a better screen but the apps I've used haven't taken advantage of it. I don't watch movies or surf the web on my phones so the larger screen is lost on me. I do, however, run a lot of terminal connections and I still prefer apps like iSSH over Connectbot. iSSH has transparent keys, touch sensitive gestures to pull up control and function keys. This level of usability even on a smaller display trumps the larger 4.65" screen.

I won't be ditching Android. I'll see if I can lemon my Nexus for S3. But for now, I am loving the iPhone 5.

Samsung 830 SSD USB 3.0 RAID-0 in OSX and Ubuntu 12.04

Striping two USB sticks was cool but I wanted to try it further with two fast SSDs.
As many people know, the Samsung 830s are fast, reliable and great SSDs. They make great candidates for a SSD based RAID.

In my search for a super fast consumer grade RAID solution, I figure I try USB 3.0 and see what happens next.

I did tests on both Mac OSX Mountain Lion and Ubuntu 12.04 (off a Gigabyte GA-H67N-USB3-B3 motherboard).

On the Mac. Making a stripe software raid-0 is pretty straightforward using Disk Utility.

In Ubuntu 12.04. Setup is almost as easy as the mac.

The results were not that great as the Thunderbolt solutions I've seen. In fact, I now think it is is more economical to get platter based spindle thunderbolt RAID drives instead of trying USB/eSATA with SSDs.

I'm getting 200 MB/s writes on both OSX/Linux and 200-300MB/s reads. Have in mind, these are blazing speeds if you only used to using regular HDDs. However, the results are unimpressive in a RAID-0 array.

Real world copy. 200 MB/s

In fact, I see no real speed gains striping two SSDs with USB 3.0. Single SSDs are just as fast.
Or simply, the USB 3.0 controllers are not up to speed with the fastest SSDs yet. This may explain why I haven't seen any interesting or worthwhile USB 3.0 RAID enclosures on the market.

I think I'm going to have to spend the cash on a Thunderbolt solution because eSATA and USB 3.0 is not cutting it for a DAS (Direct Attach Storage) solution.

Transform the Galaxy Nexus into a desktop computer

With a simple adapter and bluetooth, you can convert a Samsung Galaxy Nexus into a full desktop computer.

You will need a micro USB  to MH/HDMI adapter, a HDMI compatible monitor, and a set of bluetooth keyboard and bluetooth mouse. I use the Apple keyboard and bluetooth mouse.

This will basically mirror everything you see on the phone to the monitor. If you don't have an HDMI monitor, you can use a HDMI to DVI adapter like the one I use on this 24" Samsung.

The screen res will be what is on the phone, 1280x720. Some apps don't work quite right due to the fact they require or shift from landscape to portrait mode. For example, pulling up Netflix's movie browser looks like this:

Overall, it is a silly demo to show off your friends and colleagues. Running ICS on a large monitor is not really that intuitive  when you consider the oversized icons and UI elements designed for a 4.65" phone. The phone should have outputted a 1920x1080 display which would have been my preference.
Now, if this could dual boot into something like Ubuntu, then I can see the value of it. The original Atrix and their webtop was a very promising idea in 2011. Since, it the concept and execution has sort of fizzled into obscurity.

One last note, the MHL adapter requires power. You will need to use the existing micro-usb power adapter to power it. This sorts of kills the whole idea of using the Galaxy Nexus as a portable presentation machine. In comparison, the iPhone 4S and iPad 2/3 can be docked with a 30pin-HDMI adapter and run on battery alone.






LINK for MHL adapter: http://www.amazon.com/Menotek-Adapter-IMPROVED-Protocol-Sensation/dp/B005F9W6DU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1342718283&sr=8-3&keywords=MHL+adapter+nexus

Turn a Galaxy Tab 2.0 7" into a working desktop.

With some accessories, the 7" Galaxy Tab 2.0 can be turned into a productive desktop workstation.
Docked in an Arkon fold-up stand and connected to a Graybean USB OTG hub, the Tab 2 can be propped up with extended storage and input I/O.

The Graybean OTG USB hub supports 3 USB inputs and various sd/tf/mmc cards. I already have other OTG cables but I like the fact this sport several USB ports.

Here, I attached the Tab to a USB docked 2TB SATA drive, various USB sticks, USB keyboard and mouse.

A few notes on this setup:

A power adapter does not come with the hub yet it has a port for external power. You can't even power a keyboard or mouse without external power. I don't know if this an oversight or missing items from my order. Luckily, I had a spare power adapter on hand that worked with this hub.

Next, you can't have more than 3 USB drives connected. I've tried and it will randomly unmount drives until it has two available. The hub's sd card reader will override the internal micro-sd card. This is with a stock non-rooted device. Rooted, you can probably mount more devices.

Everything else works since Android's ICS supports USB HID and storage device. The mouse and keyboard works great. I noticed that many applications do not work as well as their desktop counterpart. For example, in Chrome, you can't right click and open a link in a new tab nor can you create a tab with a keyboard. Scrolling is reverse (aka natural scroll) similar to what you would find in OSX Lion. If you move the mouse down, the page scroll ups. Furthermore, I can't seem to disable the on-screen soft keyboard. It gets annoying whenever I reach an text input area and the soft key pops up.

So far, I use the Tab to type up simple Word compatible .docx notes and use connectbot to turn the Tab 2 into a SSH terminal. I tried a few RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) apps but the 7" screen is too small to make it useable even with a mouse and keyboard. 

I am using an Arkon stand and I think it is amazing piece of accessory for $8. It is compact, folds up easily, and works with 7" and 10" tablets like the iPad. A few people I know who have seen the Arkon stand rushed out and ordered ones for themselves. I seem to prefer using it over propping up the Tab 2 with a folio case.

Overall, this new setup has renewed my interests with the Tab 2.  I prefer the 10" Tablet size and I'm constantly trying to justify the 7" form factor. This now keeps my interest on the Tab 2 from waning.



LINKS:
Arkon Fold-up tablet stand at Amazon
Graybean USB OTG Hub at Amazon

Galaxy Tab 2 Android running Mac OS

As you can see there is a common theme here. Retro goodness and 80s nostalgia. Here we have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 running a classic operating system, Mac OS 7.5.

All you need is a a Mac Classic or Plus ROM, a disk image of the OS and minivmac  emulator at the Google Play Store.

If I have some time, I'll pull up a copy of Basilisk running Mac OS 8 on a HP Touchpad running WebOS.