A Few Days with Asus Chromebook Flip

I picked up another Chromebook recently, bought on Taobao. Probably leaked out of some factory somewhere. It’s an Asus Chromebook Flip, the ARM CPU version. The upsides are obvious: IPS screen, 1280x800, it flips around, it’s touchscreen, and the battery lasts forever.

The Chromebook I bought before got sold off. Reason being I never actually used Chrome OS — the moment it arrived I wiped it and installed Ubuntu. Using it felt no different from a ThinkPad, and honestly worse than a ThinkPad, so what was even the point.

This time I decided to actually give Chrome OS a proper try. But I’m in mainland China, and for certain reasons using this thing here definitely isn’t as smooth as in the US — bound to be a lot of pain. Though that’s more of a 2014-era take. How is it now?

The answer: not bad.

First thing I have to say: you need to get past the firewall to activate it and connect to the Google Chrome Store. The method I used was the SS LAN HTTP sharing trick.

Once you’re logged in, search for SS’s full name, find the app, download and install it, then grab a proxy-switching extension, configure it, and you can use it however you like…

Yeah, it’s that simple…

Even though this thing is ARM-based, for browsing the web it’s absurdly good, because whatever you’re looking at is always “silky smooth” — including my TinyTinyRss and YouTube pages. And bear in mind even my desktop stutters on those…

That said, some sites still aren’t silky smooth. Google+, for instance, and that garbage new thing called Spaces.

Incidentally, this thing is actually more useful for web browsing than a Pixel C. When you fold it over it’s still Chrome the browser, switching between tabs is effortless, and you can just use it as a tablet — scrolling through RSS is genuinely pleasant.

The Pixel C can only barely compete on that front once you upgrade to Android N and use split-screen.

Going by the latest direction from Google I/O, Chrome OS is getting the Android app store, and touchscreen Chromebooks will be first in line for the update.

So it looks like my laptop still has a shot. I’ll wait and see what the surprise turns out to be.

But let me wrap up against the title.

A Chromebook is basically usable in mainland China’s network environment now — provided you’ve got a good SS of your own.