Walmart taking the Chromebook mainstream – Computerworld

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240119/Walmart_taking_the_Chromebook_mainstream

Having used one of the original CR48’s fairly extensively for a year or two, I found this interesting.  My Chromebook has been retired for the time being due to heavy use and abuse (in no small part at the hands of my kids) and largely replaced with a tablet and laptop.  However, I’m fairly confident that, were I to purchase a direct replacement for it with similar physical characteristics, I’d go back to using it pretty heavily.

The two downsides I found to the Chromebook were lack of native RDP and lack of SSH, as I track a fair number of systems that I still need to access some form of on-box interface for.  I made pretty extensive use of an HTML5-to-RDP gateway (would have to look up the name now, as it has been almost a year since I’ve used it) and the Chrome “shell” SSH setup to work around these two issues simply because of the convenience, speed, and generally pleasing physical characteristics of the Chromebook… one-hand comfortable weight to quickly swing it out of the way if a kid jumped on my lap, stable and tolerable temperature for literal “lap top” use, and silent operation.