Samsung Chromebook (Wi-Fi, 11.6-Inch) Reviews
I was almost going to pull the trigger and get an Apple MacBook Air 11.6 but my wife mentioned to me that a friend of her's told her about the "Google laptop for $249". Well, I had to check it out. Since I use many of the Google Services - Mail, docs, voice, etc, and I also have an unlimited dataplan on my 4G LTE phone which I can tether the device to, I decided to give it a try. It works great for what I use it for. It is not the speediest of machines but then again at $249 it is nearly a disposable computing device after 2 years of use, btw, I think I will get much more than 2 year. Add in 12 passes for GoGo inflight internet coupons ($9 a piece) this thing was a bargain. Simply turn it on when in flight and it verifies you are on a Chromebook and you are logged in with your Google account (email) and you are surfing at 30k feet.
The battery does really seem to go the distance of 5hours and having no fan it is absolutely silent. It doesn't get hot but just warm to the touch near the back of the notebook where I think the processor is located. The keyboard is nice and very similar to the Macbook keyboards. It's a bummer there isn't a backlight but at the price point it is understandable why there isn't one.
One thing I am waiting for is a more mature upgrade/hack to run ubuntu ringtail. Someone at Google already posted a version that is supposed to work. It would make the device into a full blown laptop running the ARM Exynos Samsung processor. It will be killer to have this as a really lightweight (literally) but powerful Linux laptop for $249.
The only downside for this machine is that the surface scratches very easily. Other than that, at $249, this thing has really exceeded my expectations.
I received my Chrome book today and have spent the last few hours playing around with this. All I can say, as my review title mentioned, what am I missing here? So much of the what so many reviewers have said previously is absolutely true. If you know what you're getting into purchasing this device you will be very very satisfied with it, as am I. The screen is absolutely adequate for what you need. From the moment I fired it up I haven't once thought to myself that I wish it were brighter or clearer. The philosophical approach to this laptop is fantastic. I have loaded all my itunes music into google play, copied all my dropbox files to my google drive (which by the way is in fact 100 gb now!), and my gmail is of course already stored online. This device enables me to be self contained and able to work from this device for the majority of reasons I ever needed a desktop computer. Sure there may be occasions when I need to use the new MS office suite (2013) I just purchased but for 95% of my document needs googe docs/drive will work just fine. The entire cloud approach is very nicely represented by this chrome book and it does EXACTLY what it was designed to do. I am very satisfied and will likely log on again in a few weeks/months and provide a follow-up review. For now, I am sitting here playing my music on google play, just finished editing a MS word document I had stored and edited on google drive, and have also checked, and responsed to some email. All for $249. Seriously, cool stuff.
I got this for an early Christmas present (thanks Honey!)...I wanted to use it mainly to do web browsing and also to take it out to cafes, etc., and do writing on it. It is really an awesome little machine esp. for the price. It's got a great keyboard that's very easy to type on, it's very light and easy to carry around. I'm not very computer oriented and so, although I loved the Macbook Air when I saw it around, it is waaaaaaay out of my price range, especially for the (low level) tasks I'm using it for (surfing and writing). It is really fast, great to watch videos on....and it probably does a bunch of stuff I don't know about yet since I haven't really investigated its capabilities...I'll update my review if anything else comes up....but right now I'm very happy with it!
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