Best Practices?

After 5 days of usage, I am beginning to get a grip on the best usage or practices for this device. Since you are using the Chrome OS, your are going to be working almost exclusively in the cloud, so that is the mindset you need to adopt. This will not work for everything or everyone so keep that in mind.

Like any OS, it has always been my experience to keep things as simple as you can to get your tasks accomplished. Load only the extensions and applications that you need. Analyze your needs and make your decisions based upon that. It is really not necessary to have every bell and whistle available.

The CR48 platform is ideal for communication. It could also be used for entertainment I suppose, but that is not a side I have explored yet. For staying in touch with email, chat, twitter, facebook, foursquare, buzz or any other social application it is ideal.

A good way to economize on the OS is to utilize the iGoogle personalized home page to your advantage. Set up tabs on your personalized Google home page with things that matter to you. You could have home tab, a news tab, a market tab, or what have you. Each of these tabs can have widgets installed that will be useful to you. As an example, I have a Google tab that contains widgets for Google Latitude, Google services, Google Docs, Google Bookmarks, Google reader and Google notebook. A few other tabs I have are a Home tab with local weather and news. There enough widgets out there that you can customize your home page and its tabs to be most functional for you. Detailed personalization of your Google home page can save you space on the OS apps page.

The real key to Chrome OS, is to embrace all the Google apps and services as much as possible. I have found that integrating those apps and services to be the simplest way. Of course this makes perfect sense for Google also. Here is the link to a list of all the Google services available to you.