 This is David with The Verge and today we're taking a look at the newest version of Google's Chrome OS running on two new Samsung devices. A Series 5 Chromebook laptop and a Series 3 Chromebox desktop. As I mentioned though, Chrome OS is the real story here. It's been completely revamped and improved in a huge way. It actually feels like a real, legitimate operating system, kind of for the first time. Everything you do is still in a Chrome window, but Google made the whole user experience a lot more like Windows or Mac OS. There's a much better windowing experience. You can open things as tabs or as standalone windows that basically just look like apps. So Gmail starts to feel like a native app rather than just another tab in a Chrome window. There's also a real desktop now with a wallpaper you can change and a taskbar that looks like a mix between the dock in Mac OS and the Windows taskbar and there are quick launch settings on the right side, kind of like what you'd get in Android 4.0. The basic paradigm hasn't changed though. Apps are still websites and everything still happens in a Chrome window. It's just managed better now. Instead of having tons of tabs in a single window, you can manage it more like you would native apps. It's much faster and more stable now too. Previous versions had some problems just with basic tasks and now it just works much more fluidly and much better. The biggest problem is that there are still some things you just can't do in a web browser. Chrome OS doesn't have apps like Skype and even some chat clients or Twitter apps or photo editing apps leave a lot to be desired. It's also tough to do things like listen to music in the background. If you want to pause your music so you can watch a video, you have to switch to the correct tab and pause the music and then go back and it's just a little slower to do a lot of things that you'd normally do with native apps. Also since apps are still just bookmarks, if you click on an icon it won't know that there's already a window open and will actually open another instance and once you have 10 different windows of your email open it starts to get a little messy. At this point with Chrome OS there's really not a lot you can't do using a browser but a lot of things are still slower and clunkier than having separate native apps that the operating system recognizes as distinct things. So next there's the new hardware. First there's the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook laptop which hasn't changed much from last year's model. It's still light, it weighs 3.3 pounds and it's very clean and minimal. It's available in a silver color and it's good looking but it's not quite as sleek as the all black CR48 or the white and black Series 5 from last year. It's largely the same hardware but has a few new ports which is nice. There are two USB 2.0 ports, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, an Ethernet port and a display port. It's powered with chiclet style keys that feel a little cheap but work relatively well and there are a lot of function keys designed specifically for Chrome OS. There are keys specific to searching or switching windows or going back and forth within the browser and it just makes navigating around the OS really easy. The trackpad is also really excellent. It has two finger scrolling which works really well and it's just much more responsive and smooth than we're used to even from desktop computers. The Chromebook has a 12.1 inch 1280 by 800 matte display and since it's matte and not glossy it can actually be used outdoors which is really great. The screen's not perfect. It mutes colors a little bit and washes out when you get off the vertical axis but it works pretty well. In general the performance of the computer is really really solid. Most of that is due to the OS itself being much better but the new 1.3 gigahertz dual core Intel Celeron processor and 4 gigs of RAM work well and I never had any performance issues with the Chromebook at all. The Chromebook was generally really fast, really stable even with intensive games or flash heavy sites it really never broke down. Boot and resume times are also insanely fast. It takes about six seconds to turn on and connect to the internet and two seconds to resume from sleep which is just crazy. The Chromebook also gets really great battery life. You'll get a solid full day of use out of it, seven or eight hours and we got consistently above that on our battery tests. The device starts at $449 but for $549 you can get one with a Verizon radio inside and it actually comes with 100 megabytes of free data per month. Then there's the Chromebox. It's kind of like the Mac Mini. It's basically a bunch of ports plus Chrome OS. It has six USB ports, two display ports, an ethernet port, DVI and a headphone jack. Google says it can power screens up to 30 inches but it worked well on big TVs that we tested as well. It has the same performance as the Chromebook. It works really well. It's really stable. It has 4 gigs of RAM plus a 1.9 gigahertz dual core Intel processor and caused us again no problems in our tests but that's largely due to Chrome OS being far better than it was. So in all this is a huge leap forward for Chrome OS. It's some of the best hardware we've seen yet and the operating system is far more stable and far more useful than ever before. The problem is that I'm not sure we're ready for an operating system and a computer that live completely online and until Google is able to really make offline access work well, I'm not sure anyone will be. At $329 for the Chromebox and $449 for the Chromebook, you could easily buy a tablet or even a cheap Windows computer and you'd still have a more versatile and more useful device in all situations. Chrome OS is definitely on its way but I'm not sure it's there yet.