Why the CR-48 is not making the trip to Lotusphere

You might recall back in December I was the lucky recipient of a Google Chrome CR-48 Notebook.  I have been using it quite a bit and it has some really good points among them:

• Instant on
• Great battery life (8-10 hours of use per charge easy)
• Full Keyboard ( not the biggest deal in the world, but nice)
• Built in WiFi, and 3G (100 MB free and pay as you go plans)
• Light

Based on all this at one point I thought it was almost the perfect Lotusphere machine.  Where it is lacking is in two areas.

1. The CR-48 has very limited USB device support, it can not read my camera, or any of the card readers that I own, so there is no way to upload photos.

2. No local storage – again this is really about photos, I take a bunch of them at Lotusphere and I really don’t like to trust them for an entire week on an SD Card.  With the CR-48 there is no way to back them up locally or mass upload them to Dropbox or something similar.

So while I have other devices coming with me, my Lenovo S10 Netbook will be making the trip again this year, it is about the same weight as the CR-48, a drop heavier, and decent battery life, but adds a lot in functionality that I need.

All that said, I am sure the USB device support situation will improve over time and as Chrome netbooks hit the market, not sure what if anything they would do about small amounts of local storage.  I also believe that unless they bring them to market cheap (I mean less than $100.00 cheap) they won’t even make a dent in the surging tablet market.

I also think a year from now this would not even be a discussion, and tablets will have (even) more apps, and I would not even be looking for a full laptop of any sort for additional functionality.