New Acer Chromebook

I admit I am a little late on this one - I have been too busy to blog over the last few days.  With that in mind I am still going to mention that Acer have now released a new Chromebook, you can see the official blog post at the Google blog.

After reading up on the specs for the device I am not sure how well it stack up against the recently released Samsung Chromebook but it is always good to see more companies backing the Chromebook initiative.  A major plus of this Chromebook is that it only costs $200! I will reserve judgement until I get time to play with one, so for now I say go check it out and tell me what you think of it.

Chromebook is good for - Online learning

I am taking some online courses at the moment and due to my 'experiment' I can only use my Chromebook to take part.  At first I was a little nervous because one class is a programming class(@ Coursera) and requires the use of a web-based IDE however it turns out that this little device can handle it no problem and I have been able to continue the class without any issues.  I have also been using it on the Khan academy and again it works just great.

I have to say outside of my job I am impressed with what this little device can do and how much of my  electronic life can be completed easily without the need for a bigger laptop or an expensive tablet plus keyboard combination.

Streaming video frustration

This is one issue I was hoping would be resolved before I got around to blogging about it, but as of the time of this entry it hasn't.  I am of course talking about the Amazon Video PPAPI issue which has been ongoing for a number of weeks now.  I have been doing a little research and it appears that a large number of people have been seeing the following message whilst trying to stream video from Amazons online video solution:

If you're using the Chrome browser with Linux, you must disable PPAPI to continue using Amazon Instant Video. You can also use a different Web browser, like Firefox. Learn more

This is quite maddening - especially due to my Chromebook experiment - as this is one of my favorite sources of video content and is also why I pay for prime each year.  I can't help but wonder when Google and Amazon are going to fix this.  Neither company has any information about a resolution, but both explain how to turn off Flash which is obviously no good as Flash is required to stream.  Does anyone know of a work around for Chromebooks?

11/8/12 Update:
This appears to have been fixed in the 24hrs since my post as I am currently happily watching one of my Amazon videos... thank you Google and/or Amazon for fixing the issue