Jolicloud 1.0 review – watch out Google Chrome OS!

The final tab is your account settings and legacy apps screen. Here you can alter your personal details or grab hold of basic accessory-style applications like the calculator or sound recorder. It’s a shame these often used and important apps are cast aside like this – ideally they should take pride of place with your other, sexier applications (or the developers should offer the ability to pin them there as needed). They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t serve a valid purpose so we hope to see an update that addresses this in the future.

Still, this is a minor gripe in an otherwise well thought-out and executed interface. Adding applications from the Jolicloud repositories is as easy as clicking the green ‘Add’ button. Installations and removals are all one-click affairs and you can ‘favourite’ certain app for all your Joliclouding friends to see. In the same vein as many of the netbook remixes of current distros, your web apps open full-screen save the top bar showing the currently active applications. Clicking on the small blue cloud in the top left hand corner hides-all and returns the user to the default home screen. Usability is slick, everything fits together snuggly together and it boasts a level of cohesion not even seen from Ubuntu’s (current) netbook remix.

The search bar takes pride of place in the top centre of the interface. Not only does it let you search the internet with Chromium, but you can launch installed apps, search out apps from the repository or even find friends you’ve connected with on the Jolicloud network. It’s staggeringly easy to use and a remarkably effective use of screen space – perfectly suited to a web-based netbook operating system.

Besides the burying of legacy applications away from the trendier selection, the only shortfall we could aim at Jolicloud during testing is the emphasis the developer have placed on their own social network – even at the expense of Twitter and Facebook et al. It all centres around the second tab – the satellite dish from where you connect to other Jolicloud users. We were fully expecting it to show our friend feeds from all other social networks too, but sadly it seems this isn’t the case.

While it’s perfectly possible for a user to search local and cloud-based files and folders in the following tab, users are denied the same choice here which is a real missed opportunity. This and the inability to download the ISO directly from the Jolicloud site or from any mirrors has cost Jolicloud the opportunity to score top marks, so here’s hoping they address these shortcomings to shore up an otherwise outstanding offering.

Verdict: 4/5
While there are one or two imperfections yet to be ironed out, in the current pre-Google Chrome climate, Jolicloud provides by far and away the best cloud-based functionality and the smoothest UI of a netbook OS we’ve seen to date. Chrome OS might have the might of Mountain View behind it, but Jolicloud proves you don’t have to be a household name to create a streamlined, functional netbook OS. Let’s hope they can make the most of their head-start into the market – after all, they’re going to need it.

You can read more reviews from Linux User & Developer here, or buy a back issue online here.