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So, I was sent a Cr-48 (Google's testbed hardware for Google Chrome OS) last week and am just now getting to play with it. Some neat things:

• It really does come back from sleep instantly. I'm having to adjust to this; I have such a strong habit of closing my laptop screen partially when I'm not using it, because I don't want it to distract me but I also don't want to wait for it to wake up. That's no longer an issue.
• Panels are brilliant and wonderfully implemented. Every OS needs these, especially on a small-ish screen. And they have some really good UI polish; for instance, when opening a panel, a temporary button appears to close the panel wherever your mouse is. That way, you can open, look at, and immediately close a panel without moving the mouse.
• The touchpad isn't nearly as bad as some people have made it out to be. It's no Magic Trackpad, but it's still better than most that I've used.
• The mute button is finally implemented sanely. After pressing the mute button, the device will always be muted, even if it was before. I hate having to guess whether or not it's muted before I press the button. When I'm pressing the mute button I want the device to be muted. (The volume + button unmutes if it's muted.)
• Google Talk Voice/Video works out of the box.
• The keyboard uses lowercase letters. I'm a pretty big fan of lowercase letters over uppercase from an aesthetic standpoint, and I think they look nice on the keyboard. Typeface seems to be Univers or a variant. (Interestingly, Apple's old G4 Powerbooks used Univers on their keyboards.)

And some questions I came up with/questions I will come up with (I will answer them as I find the answers). I'm labeling this section "Infrequently Asked Questions" because if they were FAQ's they'd be answered somewhere else (i.e. I'm only posting questions here I haven't seen answered elsewhere).

Open questions:

• How do you get the finger/hand prints off this thing? It's a porous rubbery surface. Damp cloth did not work.

Answered questions:

• How do I use a reasonable SSH? / The ctrl+alt+t terminal sucks.
  
  Shell In A Box is wonderful. You can even CSS style it I think, although I find the defaults work for me. You can even use the (somewhat silly) icon my boyfriend made for me if you are so inclined.
• How do I make Hulu usable?

  I consider myself a minor expert on getting by with Flash's Linux version, which sucks many balls. (1) Give up on full screen ("lower lights" is your friend) (2) Lower the resolution (gear icon) and (3) Close other tabs.

  Back in the earlier days of Chromium OS, I found that popping the player out (it goes into a panel) and resizing it helped a lot, but that seems broken for me now.

• How do I make pseudo apps for my bookmarks?
  
  Look here. It's actually quite easy. You have to make a manifest.json file and a 128x128 transparent PNG icon. Packaging it into a .crx can be done through chrome://extensions (with the "developer mode" link on that page). You'll have to specify an autoupdate URL and host the .crx online somewhere if you want the sync to work (haven't tried that part yet).

  All this being said, I'd love to see a Chrome fullscreen.me like site that would easily appify any page. Maybe when they don't have to be packaged (coming soon I understand).

More to come, probably.