Toshiba Chromebook 2: A Feast for the Eyes
by Jarred Walton on February 11, 2015 10:00 AM ESTToshiba Chromebook 2 Battery Life
After looking at performance, I was hoping that battery life might be a saving grace for the Celeron N2840. Unfortunately, the rated battery life of “up to” nine hours is pretty much spot on. The battery capacity is slightly lower than on the Acer C720 and CB13, but there’s just no getting around the fact that they beat the Toshiba CB35 by a decent amount. Here are the charts:
In our Internet battery life test, which is the same as our tablet WiFi battery life test, the Toshiba Chromebook 2 delivers just shy of eight hours of mobility. That would be great in the world of Windows laptops, but competing Chromebooks are now delivering closer to 10 hours of battery life. Video Playback (again, with the same 720p video we use for tablet testing) is likewise quite a bit worse than competing Chromebooks, coming in 0.9 hours short of the C720 result (though that has a smaller 11.6” display) and 1.8 hours less than the Acer CB13.
There’s another way to look at things, which is the amount of power being consumed by the device. With a 44Wh battery, in our Internet test at 200 nits the Toshiba CB2 is only drawing around 5.5W for WiFi and 7.1W for 720p video, but that’s almost a full 1W more than the Acer CB13 and C720 for WiFi and 1.5-2.0W more for video decoding. And then there are the tablets; the Apple iPad Air 2 draws about 2.8W in our WiFi test and the Nexus 9 just 2.4W; for video decoding, tablets (or at least, Android and iOS) fare even better, as they use even less power than in our WiFi testing – 2.3W for the Nexus 9 and 2.2W for the iPad Air 2. Both of course have significantly smaller displays, which helps tremendously, but if you’re just looking for long battery life they’ll win every time.
Battery life still ends up being respectable, however, as there are few times where people need an uninterrupted 8+ hours of battery life with no chance to plug in. If you’re on a long flight it might be nice to get 10+, but otherwise there’s usually some chance to recharge, and whether we’re talking about eight, nine, or ten hours it’s all still “all day battery life” at some level.
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ezschemi - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
Table on page 1 says:"Intel Celeron N2840
Dual-core 2.16-2.58GHz"
while directly below the text says:
"The processor of choice this time is Intel’s Celeron N2840, a quad-core Bay Trail chip running at 2.16-2.58GHz."
dual core vs quad core. One of them is incorrect.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
Fixed. I initially thought it was a quad-core CPU (before doing additional checking), and apparently I wrote that part of the text before I fixed the table. I think I actually had the CPU listed as the N2940 at one point, which is the quad-core part.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
It's nice hardware for Chrome OS, but what worries me is that there are two fundamental problems. The price for what ought to be a budget-friendly, inexpensive throw away device is far too high when compared to cheap Windows-based notebooks like the Stream 11 (which isn't favored in benchmarks in this article, but as those benchmarks are largely Google-based and Google products will invariably see favorable numbers due to bias). In fact, across the board, Microsoft devices have really turned the tables on pricing, seemingly winning the race to the bottom with sub-$100 dollar tablets and that ilk that have greater functionality than any Chrome OS or Android device. In a price- and feature-sensitive market, Google appears to have presently lost the lead.The other problem is fundamental to the Chrome OS design being cloud-centric using Google services. Google isn't a company that's no longer commonly trusted to be a proper caretaker for user data and I often wonder what kind of information about what I'd be doing on any Google product is being sent upstream to be stored for an indefinite time period and then monetized. The general sense I get is that these sorts of trust issues are already a problem (as Google's recent moves to take Glass development in-house and out of the public view where people are being punched in the face for wearing it) and are likely to get more prominent as information security takes a more prominent role that enhances public awareness. It's a perfect storm that's brewing and Google's business model places it at the very heart of the looming controversy.
SM123456 - Saturday, February 14, 2015 - link
The Stream 11 hardware is identical to most entry level Chromebooks using the Intel Celeron N2840 Dual core Atom Bay Trail CPU and 23GB eMMC storage which are also priced $199, but the Stream 11 runs the full browser benchmarks (Google Octane and Firefox Kraken) at half the speed of the identical Chromebooks and about a third of the speed of the $179 Acer C720 Haswell Celeron 2955U Chromebooks. This is nothing to do with the fact that the benchmarks are specified by Google or Firefox - they are both good indicators of overall performance - ie. rendering, video/audio decoding, SSL encryption/decryption, etc as well as Javascript code execution - unlike SunSpider for example which just benchmarks Javascript execution.This is entirely due to the Windows resource hog the system as everything else is identical. The Sunspider pure Javascript benchmarks aren't affected by the Windows resource hog because they don't need much resources, while the full browser function benchmarks are, because they do hog resources - eg. RAM disk swap of virtual memory, use of shared RAM for graphics etc.
AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
No mention of color gamut?16GB is pathetic storage for a laptop. 32GB microSD cards are sold for $14 shipped in retail. Toshiba was literally just trying to save a few bucks. As a consumer, wouldn't you rather pay $335 instead of $330 to have 32GB? I hate it when companies cut corners like this.
The marketing dept was clearly copying Apple with those pictures, adding the diagonal glare line.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
Sorry -- I had the images and forgot to include them on the LCD page. I've added another gallery at the bottom of page 3.AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Thanks Jarred! That's commendable that you respond to and address our feedback :)CoreLogicCom - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
It's not storage for the user (unless the user is specifically using Offline capable apps). It's local storage only for the OS. The user is supposed to be 100% network connected and be using the cloud (Google Drive), which itself is 100GB of space.bsd228 - Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - link
you have 2 usb ports and an SD card slot. If you want local storage, it's trivial to add, using one of those tiny form factor usb sticks.AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, February 12, 2015 - link
Ok, the SD slot sounds like a reasonable solution for a decent hard drive.