| I'll do my best to answer your questions, as my girlfriend was the lucky recipient of a CR-48. 1) I don't have a whole lot of experience with this as we were pretty much on wifi the whole time. I do know you have to manually enable 3g in the settings though. Once 3g on I assume it's automatic when there's not wifi around. 2) Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of experience with this one either. The only pictures we every took with it were the initial user pictures, which didn't turn out all that well (although the newer chromebooks may have better cameras). I would assume you would be able to take pictures through any site that cam make use of a webcam though. 3) Battery life was pretty excellent. My girlfriend would use it all day at school for notes. It pretty much goes into hibernate when the lid is closed. 4) This is the part about the review that confuses me. The CR-48 we had always updated silently. It would update in the background, and then when the laptop was restarted it would install. I don't think I ever saw it prompt for an update. 5) First off, there are no native apps. It's literally chromium on a minimal linux build. The maps 'app' that he would have to use is the full blown maps.google.com. As long as he had a 3G connection I would think he'd be fine, otherwise I'm not too sure how much caching the web version of maps does. I hope this helps. Sorry I wasn't able to provide more info about some of your questions |
A forced update only occurs on the first turning on of the machine, presumably in case it's been on the shelf a few months. I vaguely recall having to do the same for my CR48.