I’m one of the lucky 60,000 or so people around the globe that Google graced with a CR-48 Chrome OS notebook and it’s been a pleasure to use. Almost. There are a lot of little annoyances that are going to make this project entirely flop and Google’s been aware of how to fix these issues for months. I cannot remember how many bug reports about the trackpad I’ve submitted or how many I’ve sent in about the stupidly sensitive ambient light sensor integrated into the built-in webcam housing. Today at Google I/O 2011, Google announced new notebooks with redesigned trackpads to rectify one issue, but what about the most glaring annoyance of all, the overly sensitive (and non-adjustable) light sensor? I hope they’ve either fixed this in the new laptops, there will be an adjustable slider in the upcoming ChromeOS update, or both. Since I will not be plunking down another $500 for a laptop to replace the one I received for free, I really hope the soon-to-delivered update will bring some type of adjustability.

Just now as I have been writing this, my screen has dimmed and brightened almost a dozen times, all because I’m either sitting up to adjust my back or my laptop tilts backward or forward. Yes, it’s that sensitive. My screen can move less than a quarter of an inch and I’m up to 90% brightness and I can simply sit up — but not cover the light sensor — and it’s down to ~5%. And there’s no way to change this inside of ChromeOS itself. People have “fixed” this issue by simply dumping into dev mode and installing Ubuntu or Windows 7, but that’s not a fix at all. This is an issue that Google needs to finally address and I surely hope they do. These hardware annoyances will turn people off to the offerings from Samsung and Acer faster than GoogleTV flopped, which took about, oh, two months.

However, there’s a lot to like about ChromeOS. Since it’s just an instance of Google Chrome, everything’s saved to the cloud and there’s never a worry of losing files if the computer crashes. All I have to do is reload ChromeOS and all my data comes back, just like I left it. Of course, there are downsides to that as well. At this time, things like Hulu and Netflix do not work but that’s being fixed in the upcoming mega-update announced today. Then you’ve got the free 100MB/month 3G Verizon account that’s included with every laptop. This literally saved my ass during school last semester as my wireless connection would drop every few minutes and I’d lose all my data in Google Docs (that’s a whole ‘nother downside, you lose connection, you lose the ability to do anyting). But once I activated my Verizon data, I never had an issue again and all my notes were saved in pristine fashion. The keyboard itself is fantastic once you get used to it. It’s a chiclet-style keyboard a la Macbook. I hate mushy laptop keyboards — i.e. 95% of them out there — but this once feels great once I got acclimatized to key travel and distance. This thing has great tactility and I wouldn’t trade it for my old Dell Mini9′s abomination a keyboard. The trackpad stinks but that’s a hardware issue, ol’ Goog just purchased the wrong parts. In function, its multi-touch is OK and response could be a lot better but again, that’s supposedly resolved in the new Chromebooks.

I do hope the new update that will be rolling out soon will do something about memory buffering. Right now, I’m streaming from SoundCloud and the mere act of using the backspace (and loading pages, changing tabs, etc) is causing the sound to jitter because there’s just not enough RAM to go around. That’s really annoying to backspace over a sentence and hear my music sound like a broken record.