HP Chromebook 11 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 15, 2013 2:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- HP
- Chrome OS
- Chromebook
Final Words
A company that can very easily be held as complicit in the mismanagement and decline of the mainstream PC industry, HP did nothing short of a tremendous job with the Chromebook 11.
Under Google’s influence, HP has built a near perfect example of what an entry level PC should be. It boots fast (< 13 seconds even in dev mode), has a great display, comes with dual-band 2-stream 802.11n WiFi, has good sounding speakers, looks stylish, is light and feels well built. The keyboard is great and even the clickpad isn’t as bad as it is on far more expensive PCs. You honestly get one of the best examples of a portable machine for $279, and that’s without even relying on the benefits of Chrome OS to help sell the bundle. Anyone looking for a glorified web browsing, email checking, internet terminal will be right at home with Chrome OS. Flash works and you obviously get what’s arguably the world’s best web browser. You don’t have to worry about updates, malware or viruses, all of that is taken care of for you. It’s the modern typewriter equivalent, a true entry level computer, and HP/Google have done an excellent job in bringing this to market.
Chrome OS is extremely purpose built and it is something that should bring about great concern to those at Microsoft. I personally don’t have a problem with Windows 8, but purpose built is hardly a phrase that applies to the OS - at least if you’re talking about it on a more traditional PC. I suspect by the time we get to Windows 9, Microsoft will have a better answer to the critics of 8/8.1, but that gives Google and its Chrome OS partners at least another year of marketshare erosion. At the beginning of this mobile journey I remember x86 being an advantage for Intel, and we all know what happened to that. Similarly, I remember Windows/Office being advantages for Microsoft. If Microsoft doesn’t find a quick solution for making low cost Windows PCs just as well executed as Chrome OS devices, it’ll find itself in a world where Windows no longer matters to entry-level/mainstream users.
My only complaint about the Chromebook 11 really boils down to silicon selection. Samsung’s Exynos 5250 is just too slow. A pair of Cortex A15s running at up to 1.7GHz draws too much power and doesn’t deliver the sort of multitasking performance that we’ve come to expect in 2013. You can forget about having a good experience multitasking while playing YouTube videos. Streaming music in the background while you surf the web is about as far as you’re going to be able to push the Chromebook 11 without incurring significant lag. There are clearly better options on the market today, either Snapdragon 800, a quad-core A15 based design or my personal pick for this type of a machine: Intel’s Bay Trail.
If you’re looking for the Chromebook 11 to last you for 5 years, I’d be very concerned about you running out of CPU power well before then. For lighter use you’ll be fine, but with things like the Haswell Celeron based Acer C720 selling for $250 it’s clear that HP went a little too slow on the CPU front. I haven’t seen the C720 in person but my guess is you’re sacrificing display for CPU performance. HP got the mix nearly perfect with the Chromebook 11, with a faster CPU this wouldn’t just be a great machine for light use but likely the perfect entry-level notebook.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
90 Comments
View All Comments
Theard - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link
what Joe implied I am inspired that some one able to make $8901 in 1 month on the computer. Get More Information .... jobs23.comLunyone - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Yeah I would say similar thoughts as Klug4Pres. I think the better CPU is needed today and also for future uses. This could be the rebirth of the EEE PC era, but in a different form factor (bigger). I think people are looking for cheap and quality built basic PC's for the basics. I know tablets can take that factor up to some extent, but having the built in keyboard w/decent performance and a good screen is what most people like.I have the Acer V5 (won on Anandtech!) and it is quite an interesting laptop. It has a similar 11.6" screen size, but comes w/4 AMD Temash cores and Windows 8. I like the quick boot up from a cold start and the form factor is quite nice for light and portable. I have a 15.6" laptop that I use also, but it can be a bit heavy/bulky for some situations (couch/bed positions).
This Chromebook looks quite interesting at the price point, but as Anand stated, it should have a better CPU in it for multi-tasking.
OneOfTheseDays - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
What a joke of a review.Let me see here. Pay $279 for a laptop with crappy keyboard/touchpad, god awful performance (can't even stream HD youtube), ZERO multitasking abilities, is essentially a glorified browser that can't do anything outside of the Google ecosystem, and has ABYSMAL 4 hour battery life for an ARM processor.
There is absolutely no reason to get this over any of the upcoming 8.1 Bay Trail hybrids/netbooks coming out this fall. The Asus T100 is an infinitely better buy in every way. Spend the extra $50 and you get a significantly better machine in every aspect that can do everything the Chromebook can do better.
There is a reason why Chromebooks have something like 0.02% of the marketshare. They absolutely suck in just about every category imaginable. Google fanboys like Anand desperately want to see MSFT dethroned, which is why they pimp such obvious garbage at every turn.
Drumsticks - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
I swear anand has been called a fanboy of every different platform at some point.That said, I almost agree just not on such extremes. To be fair, I believe he mentioned the keyboard being great and the clickpad being as good as or even better than some more expensive PCs. Similarly, sound and display are good for the price. So you aren't really giving (at least the hardware) engineering credit. It would certainly be nice to see this same machine running windows, if Microsoft would only consider eating into their Windows revenue.
damianrobertjones - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
"and display are good for the price" - Every Windows laptop review literally slams the 1366x768 resolution so the same should really be applied here!Onkel Harreh - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Admittedly, the Macbook Air 11 also uses this resolution. I think at 11 inches, it's acceptable, only because Apple haven't ditched it yet.Guspaz - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
The Macbook Air uses a TN panel. Now, it's a pretty decent TN panel that looks quite good once calibrated (I've got a 2012 13" Mac Air), but it's still not IPS.isid - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Did you not see this quote?"Although the 11.6-inch display boasts a pedestrian 1136 x 768 resolution, it’s an IPS panel devoid of the sort of color/contrast shift at off-center angles you normally get with a cheap PC notebook."
He acknowledges the low resolution, but explains why it's a decent display nevertheless. An IPS display on a $279 notebook is pretty decent, especially when it has decent color reproduction and blacks. The displays on cheap Windows notebooks are often horrible washed out dim messes without even considering the resolution.
Krysto - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Because they cost $500+, and don't even use IPS. This costs half of that and uses IPS.Next question.
Qwertilot - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
You'd need a somewhat more powerful processor and quite a bit more storage to run windows sensibly which would push the price up a bit - especially so if you kept the SSD storage.You could drop the build quality of course but, as he says in the review, that just shouldn't happen. With nice, cheap, tablets around with great screens etc, laptops really do need to have this sort of build/screen/storage quality as a baseline.
A lightweight linux would be possible (as per the original netbooks) but Chrome os can probably stand in nicely enough.