The Chrome Cast

This week on The Chrome Cast, we start our conversation around the beautiful and slightly-confounding Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2.  As I thought when entering my review period with this device, this is a tough Chromebook to review.  With such a striking similarity to its predecessor, it is impossible not to draw comparisons between the two, and that leaves the new Galaxy Chromebook 2 in a bit of an awkward position.  Our review is coming, but tune in to hear my thoughts at this point in the process.

For the second half, our conversation is dominated by Google's new 4-week update approach to Chrome.  While not clear what will happen with Chrome OS amidst this update, we have some thoughts on how things will progress once Chrome 94 hits in Q4 of 2021.  It has a bit to do with the maturation of Chrome OS and the continued work being done on the standalone version of Chrome that is being built for Chromebooks, currently code named 'Lacros'.

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This episode is also brought to you by NordVPN. Get a VPN that takes your privacy seriously. NordVPN is our VPN of choice and will secure your browsing on your Chromebook or on any device. Use NordVPN to keep your private data to yourself whether you are at home or on the go! CLICK HERE to try it out and get a 3-year deal for $3.49/month.

Join our Patreon community and get access to things like behind-the-scenes footage, early access to videos, private Discord server access, an ad-free experience on the mobile and desktop versions of the website, your name listed on all our YouTube videos, and monthly live stream Q&A. CLICK HERE to be a part of our community.

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Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on The Chrome Cast, we start our conversation out by highlighting the very-excellent Simplify Gmail Chrome extension that just hit version 2.0.  We reported on this earlier in the week and many, many people seemed very interested in the service and we get into a few of the reasons why this take on Gmail isn't just a good-looking change to the messy Gmail inbox, but a real productivity booster with tons of extra features for end users, too.

In the second half, we delve into the tweet from Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer that teased upcoming hardware and software for Chrome OS fans in the 2021 calendar year.  As Hiroshi doesn't tend to tweet without quite a bit of thought going into what he has to say, I think we're safe to assume the things he mentioned in the tweet will likely come to pass.  Devices and software that are "fire" are on the way and we expect to see them soon.  There's obviously good reason to think this already with all the hardware we're currently keeping track on on the horizon, but this tweet just re-lit the flame.

This episode is also brought to you by NordVPN. Get a VPN that takes your privacy seriously. NordVPN is our VPN of choice and will secure your browsing on your Chromebook or on any device. Use NordVPN to keep your private data to yourself whether you are at home or on the go! CLICK HERE to try it out and get a 3-year deal for $3.49/month.

Join our Patreon community and get access to things like behind-the-scenes footage, early access to videos, private Discord server access, an ad-free experience on the mobile and desktop versions of the website, your name listed on all our YouTube videos, and monthly live stream Q&A. CLICK HERE to be a part of our community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on The Chrome Cast, we're celebrating 100 episodes with a little giveaway.  You can find details below on how to get entered beneatht he embed where we're  talking quite a bit about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2, the reservations, the pre-orders, the release dates, and the expectations that come along with this unreleased Chromebook.  With a March 1st launch date now set, we're ready to finally find out if Samsung's choices to pull things back from the bombastic Galaxy Chromebook are worth it.

In the second half of the podcast, we spend some time talking about the upcoming ARM-powered Chromebooks like 'Coachz' with its Snapdragon 7c chipset and what MediaTek's new MT8192 and MT8195 processors could be like in real world use.  With the MT8195 finally starting Chromebook development in the past few weeks, we know these ARM-powered Chroembooks are closer than they've ever been.

NOTABLE LINKS

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This episode is also brought to you by NordVPN. Get a VPN that takes your privacy seriously. NordVPN is our VPN of choice and will secure your browsing on your Chromebook or on any device. Use NordVPN to keep your private data to yourself whether you are at home or on the go! CLICK HERE to try it out and get a 3-year deal for $3.49/month.

Join our Patreon community and get access to things like behind-the-scenes footage, early access to videos, private Discord server access, an ad-free experience on the mobile and desktop versions of the website, your name listed on all our YouTube videos, and monthly live stream Q&A. CLICK HERE to be a part of our community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is sponsored by VIZOR for Chromebooks. Schools, do you have Chromebooks? Are you using PowerSchool’s SIS? Introducing VIZOR for Chromebooks, a Chromebook management solution that goes beyond your Google Admin functionality. It integrates with the Google Admin Console and PowerSchool. Track who has what, track check-out programs, and manage repairs. Schedule a product demo to see if VIZOR for Chromebooks can help your school.

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This week on The Chrome Cast, we begin our discussion around the growing 'Works With Chromebook' initiative from Google.  Though it seems nearly everything you plug into a Chromebook works these days, Google is going the extra step to ease consumers' minds about peripherals that they may come across in a store like Best Buy or Walmart.  If it is marked 'Works With Chromebook', then it just works.

We also get into the crazy new USI pen tech that we're now seeing being tested on Chromebooks with Ufro's color-picking pens that simply work with Chromebooks.  No additional steps are needed to touch an object in the real world and replicate it almost instantly on your Chromebook.

Finally, we tackle the long-standing issues we've had with YouTube Music, app confusion, lacking cast support, and the fact that Google understands where it has failed here and has officially stated that they are on the road to fixing not just the casting woes with YouTube Music, but the offline access as well.

NOTABLE LINKS

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This episode is also brought to you by NordVPN. Get a VPN that takes your privacy seriously. NordVPN is our VPN of choice and will secure your browsing on your Chromebook or on any device. Use NordVPN to keep your private data to yourself whether you are at home or on the go! CLICK HERE to try it out and get a 3-year deal for $3.49/month.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on The Chrome Cast, we’re diving into the tough news of the week regarding the shut down of Stadia’s in-house game studio. The move definitely comes with some indications about the future of Stadia and what the service could morph into over time, so it’s worth quite a bit of discussion on our part this week.

For the second half, we get into a few new devices that are on the horizon in the upcoming ASUS Chromebook Flip CM3000 and the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2. Both devices are intriguing in their own ways and we’re hopeful that both become available by the end of the month.

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This week on The Chrome Cast, we dig into many of the new features that have arrived in the Chrome OS world with version 88 of the operating system.  With the new screen saver, WebAuthn, and the updated screen capture tool, there's a lot to love about the latest update for your Chromebook.

Additionally, we spend some time talking about the recent arrival in the office: the Lenovo Thinkpad C13 Yoga Chromebook.  That's a big title and it's affixed to a Chromebook that brings a whole lot to the table.  Sure, it's aimed at the enterprise market, but that doesn't mean it's not a fantastic device that brings some seriously unique features along with it and could potentially be a great fit for many users.

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This episode is also brought to you by NordVPN. Get a VPN that takes your privacy seriously. NordVPN is our VPN of choice and will secure your browsing on your Chromebook or on any device. Use NordVPN to keep your private data to yourself whether you are at home or on the go! CLICK HERE to try it out and get a 3-year deal for $3.49/month.

Join our Patreon community and get access to things like behind-the-scenes footage, early access to videos, private Discord server access, an ad-free experience on the mobile and desktop versions of the website, your name listed on all our YouTube videos, and monthly live stream Q&A. CLICK HERE to be a part of our community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on The Chrome Cast, we were excited to dig in a bit on the 9 new Chromebooks announced at BETT 2021 that range from the latest small-core Jasper Lake Intel devices to ARM-powered Chromebooks with MediaTek and Snapdragon internals. The yearly education-focused show always follows closely behind CES and, like it always does, comes replete with a slew of new classroom-ready Chromebooks.

The second half of the podcast features commentary from our very own Michael Perrigo as we dive a bit deeper into Stadia, what the mysterious ‘Project Hailstorm’ could end up being, and further explain what Google is up to with the long-awaited Manifest v3 that is arriving in Chrome and Chrome OS 88. There’s a lot to unpack here, so we hope you can give it a listen!

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This episode is also brought to you by NordVPN. Get a VPN that takes your privacy seriously. NordVPN is our VPN of choice and will secure your browsing on your Chromebook or on any device. Use NordVPN to keep your private data to yourself whether you are at home or on the go! CLICK HERE to try it out and get a 3-year deal for $3.49/month.

Join our Patreon community and get access to things like behind-the-scenes footage, early access to videos, private Discord server access, an ad-free experience on the mobile and desktop versions of the website, your name listed on all our YouTube videos, and monthly live stream Q&A. CLICK HERE to be a part of our community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is sponsored by VIZOR for Chromebooks. Schools, do you have Chromebooks? Introducing VIZOR for Chromebooks, a Chromebook management solution that goes beyond your Google Admin functionality. It integrates with G Suite and with your Student Information System. Track who has what, track check-out programs, and manage repairs. Schedule a product demo to see if VIZOR for Chromebooks can help your school.

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Just like that, another CES is in the books and though we weren’t in Vegas this year for the annual tech show, things were still getting announced left and right. That includes quite a few Chromebooks this year, totaling 5 new official announcements and one teaser. We sincerely feel like this is just the tip of the iceberg for Chromebooks in 2021, but it was a great start to a year we’re convinced will be chock-full of new Chrome OS hardware.

Specifically today, we spend quite a bit of time talking through the big ASUS Chromebooks that were unveiled and how after a year of not much from ASUS in 2020, it feels like they are back in the game and offering up a wide range of Chromebooks that should find a place in just about any budget. There was a lot to cover and we’re excited about CES, but it’s just the beginning. Trust us: there’s much more coming.

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This episode is also brought to you by NordVPN. Get a VPN that takes your privacy seriously. NordVPN is our VPN of choice and will secure your browsing on your Chromebook or on any device. Use NordVPN to keep your private data to yourself whether you are at home or on the go! CLICK HERE to try it out and get a 3-year deal for $3.49/month.

Join our Patreon community and get access to things like behind-the-scenes footage, early access to videos, private Discord server access, an ad-free experience on the mobile and desktop versions of the website, your name listed on all our YouTube videos, and monthly live stream Q&A. CLICK HERE to be a part of our community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on The Chrome Cast, we’re talking CES 2021 and about a couple Chromebooks that were released via the yearly tech show. Sure, we’re not in Vegas this year and yes, we’d love to actually be there with our hands on new hardware amongst the energy of CES, but that’s just not in the cards with the pandemic continuing to do its damage.

In fact, we’re completely quarantined ourselves as a person in our shared co-working space at the office tested positive for COVID-19 earlier this week. Don’t worry, we all tested negative today at 5 days out from our exposure, but we’ve not been in the studio or office all week and it has been a bit inopportune with CES getting ramped up.

Either way, we’ll be back next week and sharing some video content about what we’ve seen from the show so far and we got to spend the entirety of the podcast this week talking through our thoughts on the new Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 and Acer Chromebook Spin 514 that have already both been announced as part of CES 2021. For now, we hope you enjoy our reactions via this fully-remote podcast and do forgive the compromised audio this week as we’re all working from our homes for now.

This episode is also brought to you by NordVPN. Get a VPN that takes your privacy seriously. NordVPN is our VPN of choice and will secure your browsing on your Chromebook or on any device. Use NordVPN to keep your private data to yourself whether you are at home or on the go! CLICK HERE to try it out and get a 3-year deal for $3.49/month.

Join our Patreon community and get access to things like behind-the-scenes footage, early access to videos, private Discord server access, an ad-free experience on the mobile and desktop versions of the website, your name listed on all our YouTube videos, and monthly live stream Q&A. CLICK HERE to be a part of our community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on The Chrome Cast, we are taking a bit to discuss some of our favorite things from 2020 and taking a look towards what we're most looking forward to in 2021.  For the past year, the mid-range Chromebook emergence takes up the bulk of our discussion time and looking forward, devices like the Snapdragon Chromebook tablet 'Coachz', Chromebooks with GPUs and ARM processors dominate the things we are most anticipating in the new year.

NOTABLE LINKS

This episode is also brought to you by NordVPN. Get a VPN that takes your privacy seriously. NordVPN is our VPN of choice and will secure your browsing on your Chromebook or on any device. Use NordVPN to keep your private data to yourself whether you are at home or on the go! CLICK HERE to try it out and get a 3-year deal for $3.49/month.

Join our Patreon community and get access to things like behind-the-scenes footage, early access to videos, private Discord server access, an ad-free experience on the mobile and desktop versions of the website, your name listed on all our YouTube videos, and monthly live stream Q&A. CLICK HERE to be a part of our community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices