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.
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Homeles - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
"There is absolutely no reason to get this over any of the upcoming 8.1 Bay Trail hybrids/netbooks coming out this fall."Had you actually passed kindergarten, you'd have been able to comprehend the following sentence, and therefore would be making such an asinine comment:
"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."
Do the world a favor and learn how to read. In the meantime, please refrain from spewing your garbage on the internet.
SM123456 - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
It is a brilliant screen and a damn goof keyboard and touchpad.meacupla - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Poor battery life AND performance?I guess something had to be compromised at that price point.
Onkel Harreh - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
I agree the 5250 is poor. However, I think battery life is acceptable as an entry level netbook - more expensive ultrabooks can more or less meet these results. The battery life being poor is only relative to the use of a (supposedly) low power ARM chip and compared to tablets.ShieTar - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Well, the performance is very comparable to the current class of 10" tablets, and the screen is marginally larger, but at a lousy resolution (a quarter of the pixel number of a Note 10.1), and a lower brightness. There is really no reason why the battery life of this machine should be this poor. Maybe it can still be fixed by a software update.Tibbs - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
On the Display page: "Although the 11.6-inch display boasts a pedestrian 1136 x 768 resolution"Surely you mean 1366 x 768?
eiriklf - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
I seriously doubt snapdragon 800 would be noticeably better than the exynos dual here, the snapdragon 800 just cannot keep up with any of the single task benchmarks you posted, and although it has four cores there is no more memory bandwidth than the exynos has. Now baytrail on the other hand would be a great improvement.BMNify - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Chrome OS is a joke of an operating system, better to spend slightly more and buy the upcoming Baytrail Windows 8.1 convertibles.tipoo - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
The Intel powered 14 inch version is only 299, I'd be hard pressed choosing this one.fmillmd - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
I really like my original cheap $199 Acer Chromebook. It has lived up totally to my realistic expectations, email, surfing, researching. correspondence and blogging. I use it now more than all my other desktops and laptops and prefer the Chrome OS now by far over iOS, Mountain Lion Mac OS and Windows 8. Simple very fast. I can utilize the scads of add on extensions to complement and add estoeric task specific extensions to do more specific tasks and have not found anything I that I need that I cannot find an app-extension to perform. I find in this age of persvasive presence WiFi hotspots that when I do travel, I can always easily use it online and have not found this a hindrance at all. I have long backed up file on all my machines to both Cloud based services and ext HDs and can replicate those cautionary practice exactly on the Chromebook without a high learning curve. And the setup is nonexistent, it is just easily available. I now await premium Chromebook models to evolve and come out with faster chips, and larger on board memory and storage as Google refines their core Documents Sheets etc. apps to be used offline in the future as well. As an accesssory machine that will surprise the new buyer in that it will easily take over all but the most CPU intensive tasks like big time pix and video editing, it will not disappoint.