NetHosted Blog

If you’re new to Chromebooks I’d recommend you start with our Chromebook Preview.

The Samsung Chromebook Series 5 is the first of the Chromebooks to be released, and can be found for £349 at Amazon, but what do you get for your money? Not a whole lot really.

Allow me to elaborate, the Chromebook is a fairly stylish (if somewhat dated Apple-esque looking) 12.1″ netbook running Chrome OS which is essentially a browser based operating system. Now I used the word netbook which certainly isn’t a glowing adjective, but to describe it as much more would be generous. This is an Intel Atom N570 based netbook (note that Intel themselves describe it as a “processor for netbooks”) with 2GB RAM and a 16GB SSD and whilst this low power CPU means that 8-9 hours of battery life is a possibility it also means that it struggles playing 720P HD videos. This lack of oomph means that the Chromebook can’t do more than a typical netbook, with web browsing and office apps the order of the day, even Angry Birds from the Chrome store can’t run in it’s HD mode. Yes, this means that a phone would do a better job at this than the Chromebook.

When you open up the Chromebook you find a fairly large well spaced keyboard for a netbook, the standard “F” function keys have been removed from the top and replaced with some Chrome OS specific shortcut buttons for adjusting volume and switching between tabs. This large keyboard does work very well and is comfortable to use. They have also included a large trackpad, with extra space on this freed up by doing away with the left and right buttons, instead you left click by tapping a finger, and right click by tapping two fingers on the pad. This system works well and frees up the trackpad space which is very useful as you won’t be using a mouse.

Whilst the hardware story is not a great one, the Chromebook does impress with it’s fast start-up time, ready in a few seconds seconds, and the battery life is very good. The always connected nature of it means that a 3G contract is really required to use this properly on the move (assuming no wifi). The simplicity of it is a plus point too, there isn’t any fiddling required with antivirus or windows, you can just sign into a Google account and you are good to go. The 12.1″ display with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels is actually very good with accurate and vibrant colour reproduction too.

The Chromebook is a mixed bag overall, with some strong points and some weaknesses, as new Chromebooks are released though this could become a competitive platform. Improving the CPU and graphics to the level where HD video playback is comfortable would be a good start, if this could be coupled with a £50 or so price reduction this could become an attractive proposition. Right now though it’s hard to recommend these unless they are purely for businesses, used by people that won’t have any real demands beyond document editing and web browsing however in this situation they may well be the best tool for the job right now. For similar money much more capable laptops are available and these would be preferable for home users that would be using these for entertainment as well as business.