Sunday, July 21, 2013

Samsung Chromebook - Is it useful?

Recently, I picked up the Samsung Chromebook as it seems like a decent device for web browsing at a very compelling price. Since the laptop share hardware closer to a tablet, it runs very cool and has no fans. It has an SSD which offers quick boot speeds. 
So, lets start off with the good and what this machine has going for it. It is light, gets 6 hour battery life and runs cool but yet has with the dual core processor enough power for a good web browsing experience. This makes it great for coffee shops and students taking notes in class. The screen is very bright and has great colors and contrast. The keyboard keys are clearly a lower grade plastic but the keyboard does feel decent and the key spacing feels normal. Finally the touchpad which your finger easily glides over and the gestures to work well.

The laptop doesn't have many ports, but it has HDMI, 2 USB ports one being 3.0. It as a SD card slot which accepts SXDC which can have very high speeds, but the card doesn't insert all the way, so left in it could get snapped off. There is also a headphone jack for planes or to not disturb others.

Now, for the bad. So, this laptop has many limitations. The machine runs Chrome OS, which runs solid but only gives you access to the Internet and applications available in Chrome. This also means the machine is mostly useless without an Internet connection. You can use some application in offline mode that support it The machine has 2GB of memory, which is enough since Chrome OS uses little memory, but don't expect to be able to have piles of tabs open without impacting performance.

The laptop is not perfect, but if the drawbacks are not something that you need or care about, then this little machine could very well be the machine for you. My current laptop runs warm with a short battery life. I got this to do light browsing and emailing and it is working very well at that. I also will be starting classes in the fall and this will be very handy for notes without having to plug in or worry about the fan.

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