Gadgetory

well this is David with the verge and this is HP's Chromebook 11 this is the device Google calls the Chromebook for everyone it's the successor to Samsung's $249 series five Chromebook which has been number one on Amazon's best-selling laptops list since the day it came out of course there's still no faster way to the top of Amazon's list than to be cheap that's why the Chromebook 11 is just 279 dollars the Chromebook 11 has a dual-core Samsung Exynos processor a two-year old chip that's also in the Nexus 10 tablet and in last year's Chromebook it comes with two gigs of RAM and 16 gigabytes of internal storage which are roughly what you'd expect to find on a high-end smartphone it even charges over a micro USB port which is actually awesome it comes with a super-powerful long cable that can also charge your phone and for most people it means you'll only need one cable to charge your phone tablet and laptop any charger other than HP's will charge a laptop much more slowly but there's no chance you'll ever be totally out of luck from a pure hardware perspective the Chromebook 11 is not that different from just attaching a keyboard to a nexus 10 and the Nexus 10 has a better screen and better apps but what the Chromebook 11 is is beautiful it's a thin light laptop about two and a third pounds and about two thirds of an inch thick it's almost exactly the size of the 11 inch MacBook Air it comes in white or black and the white Waddle comes with four accent colors blue red yellow and green the accents are subtle and your computer's mostly still white but it's a nice look nonetheless it's all glossy plastic virtually seamless on the back it gives a really great really classy first impression especially with the lid up stripe of Google colors that looked so great on the Chromebook pixel it's well-designed more than well made though the plastic is slick and gets oily and full of fingerprints really easily and it creaks and gives when you pick it up in the wrong place the Chromebooks 11.6 inch 1366 by 768 display is really good surprisingly so given the relatively average resolution colors are great and accurate especially the deep blacks the screens glossy and reflective but is still perfectly usable and it's a huge upgrade over the dim muted display on last year's model so are the speakers which HP and Google embedded in the colored stripe are on the keyboard they're loud and surprisingly full feeling like two distinct speakers as laptop speakers go they're pretty great in the middle of those speakers is the full-size chrome specific keyboard with a dedicated search button and a handful of Chrome OS friendly function buttons the keyboard is plasticky and a little bit cheap feeling but it clicky and comfortable and I got used to it really quickly the trackpad was a much bigger problem it's sticky and hard to move your finger around and gestures like to finger scrolling and pinch to zoom or slow and laggy of course part of that lag isn't just the touch pads fault chrome OS is still mostly just a series of cleverly disguised browser windows and if you try to open more than a couple at a time things start to slow down really quickly YouTube videos start to stutter and drop frames when you watch them in HD same with local files even scrolling is jittery and laggy on heavy websites slightly higher and hardware might also make for better battery life for right now I got about four and a half hours on our battery test but we've been waiting for a Chromebook that really truly lasts all day this isn't that the overwhelming problem for Chromebooks right now is that it's still hard to justify their existence that's why they're so cheap at prices like the Chromebook 11 it's not that hard to make a case for a device that's best for email and web browsing and not so great at everything else the HP Chromebook 11 is I'm sure going to be Amazon's best selling laptop for the next year and if you know what you're getting into if you're okay with a computer that's fast enough nice enough capable enough it's a great machine it's certainly an upgrade over last year's Chromebook with a better display better keyboard and a much improved design for $279 that's not really a bad proposition just make sure you know what you're getting into even a $279 Windows laptop will do more and run better than the Chromebook 11 though it certainly won't look as good doing it I'm still holding out hope for a slightly more powerful slightly more expensive Chromebook that might do less than my laptop but does what it can do just as well and we're not quite there yet