gdgt

I'll add my impressions of the two to the mix here. I work as a web developer, so I've offered my take on the Cr-48 both from a personal and professional perspective (note that my impressions here are based on the Cr-48 without the developer switch flipped; that gives a more robust shell and solves a few other problems I point out, but I figured I'd stick to the stock offering for awhile to give some "untainted" impressions). While I never used Jolicloud as my primary work system, I did give it a go a few months back for personal use.

JOLICLOUD:
I was underwhelmed overall. As @frankspin said, it feels a lot like Ubuntu Netbook Remix with a weak skin and a collection of bookmarks to web apps. Based on the latest alphas for Natty (11.04), I'm guessing that the stock UNR is going to be pretty hard to beat, especially as Ubuntu One & Unity continue to mature and we see an increasing number of netbooks with touchscreens. Jolicloud stands with one foot in both worlds, which can be fantastic (as you'll see in my complaints about Chrome OS below) but it's sluggish enough to not feel "right" as an instant-on OS and it doesn't offer anything beyond stock Ubuntu that you couldn't do in 2 hours of customizing to warrant being a replacement for a "desktop" OS.

CHROME/CHROMIUM OS / CR-48:
While I've found the Cr-48 a little lacking as a dedicated work machine, it's been pretty fantastic for personal use. I prefer netbooks to tablets (as a command-line/keyboard shortcut junkie and a 80 WPM typist, I find soft keyboards frustrating beyond words), and the boot time for Chrome OS *really* fast (above and beyond what you'd expect for an SSD and a traditional OS). It nicely cuts out the cruft to get you to your web browsing, which is about 90% of what I use netbooks for anyway. While this thing might be a bit sluggish at times (especially with Flash content, surprise!), it's the perfect travel device (8 hours+ of battery life in real-world usage) provided you are in places with a reliable 'Net connection. Also, I'm anticipating that by the time real production Chrome OS devices arrive on the scene (6 - 12 months?), the hardware world will have advanced and the software will have been tightened up a bit. So, as a "3rd device", this Cr-48 w/ Chrome OS beats my old Lenovo X-Series "netbook" w/ Jolicloud hands down (even with weaker hardware).

As a work device, the sluggishness (especially with more than a few screens/tabs open) really started to grind on me. I'm used to a dual-core/4GB RAM machine and while the SSD here is nice, there's just not enough memory in here for a power user at work. The inclusion of the minimal shell (crosh) with a basic ssh client was the saving grace for me as the machine would have been completely unusable for my work otherwise. I *must* have a way to edit lots of files pretty much continually and Bespin just isn't up to the task yet. Despite the majority those files being maintained in Mercurial repositories on a remote server and my preference for vim over all else, I found it somewhat disconcerting to be faced with maintaining a mammoth screen session (my typical sessions are 3-5 windows/tabs, on the Cr-48, I found myself with as many as 10 to compensate for the lack of a local editor) and facing the subtle lag of an interactive ssh session worsened by the sluggish hardware. To be fair, this is a half-step above prototype hardware and the OS doubtless has additional troubleshooting hooks enabled to facilitate the pilot program. Also, while my need for a local network is minimal (my company is on Google Apps), I found myself SOL with respect to local-only resources. At various times, I needed to access a local Samba fileshare, a remote machine via VNC, and print to a network printer on the LAN. None of these tasks is possible without the resource in question having a public IP (and AFAIK, there's no way to touch the Samba fileshare natively from Chrome OS). Whoops :)

At the end of the day, if I'm going on personal travel, the Cr-48 works great since I can get any urgent work done that I need to in a pinch and while it's not ideal, skipping my workstation-grade laptop and not carrying 2 devices is really liberating. However, this isn't going to replace my daily workhorse anytime soon and I honestly doubt it will for most people in a business setting. It's just not *quite* there.

I tried Chromium OS, 6 months ago and the system was unstable. With Jolicloud, my 3 PC (laptop, netbook and e-book) are hyper successful as well on Web as on applications LINUX. However, the whims are not allowed, because the programs coming from the cloud are in only reading, advantage: not need of antivirus, thus acceleration in the starting up. Jolicloud is not made for the programmers, but for the furious surfers and the downloaders of music and movies.

I tried Jolicloud a while back and was pretty disappointed when I finally got my beta invite. They pretty much took UNR and just built in a different landing page. While Chrome still doesn't have a lot of "apps" yet from what I saw of Jolicloud, their integration of apps was nothing more than you creating a folder and placing web shortcuts in there. I think it will probably fade away and just become another Netbook OS. Where I find Chrome potentially standing out is that they are actually having people building real web-apps for the browser. Take a look at Tweetdeck, NYTimes, NPR, Amazon Windowplace, etc.