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Zeichick’s Take: Two new toys: a Lion and a Chromebook


By Alan Zeichick


 Alan Zeichick
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July 25, 2011 —  (Page 1 of 3)
I didn’t know which toy to play with first: Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” running on my “late 2010” 13-inch MacBook Air, or the new Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook. So, I’ve been playing with both of them.

Let’s start with Lion, which began shipping on Wednesday, July 20. I use the term “shipping” advisedly; for now, the only way to get Lion is to download it from Apple’s Mac App Store for US$29.95. It was a 3.7GB file, which fortunately transferred under an hour. I feel bad for those who don’t have a lot of bandwidth.

The word on the street is that Lion is a hybrid. It's supposedly half Mac OS X and half iOS—the operating system found on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Frankly, I don’t see it. There are only three things that are somewhat iOS-like in appearance:

• There is a new program launcher called Launchpad, which displays the icons for all your installed applications in a grid. Yeah, it’s kinda like the iPad. However, that's a secondary way to start programs. In fact, Launchpad is an application itself, not a built-in part of the user interface. You can still start programs the way you always did: by pressing their icons on the Dock, by finding the apps in the Applications folder, or by double-clicking a file. The Launchpad is merely a new way to find the program you want to run.

• The Mail client has been redesigned and does look like the iPad version. Messages in a mailbox are listed on the left, while the contents of a selected message are shown on the right. Previously, the list of messages was on the top, and the selected message was shown on the bottom. There’s a setting to switch back to the old layout. Oh, and you can view messages organized by thread. Big deal.

• And the Address Book contact database has an interface that looks more like an old-fashioned contact notebook, which is definitely more like on the iPad. However, it behaves the same way as the Mac version always did, only with a slightly changed skin.


Related Search Term(s): Apple, Chromebook, Google, Lion

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