Samsung Chromebook

When you first pick up Samsung’s new Chromebook, you could easily be excused for thinking it’s a MacBook Air. The model we tested had a similar 11″-ish screen, a very similar light gunmetal grey/silver casing, and the keyboard has the same black chiclet feel about it. The Chromebook is also quite thin, at 17.5mm at its thickest, and it is quite light at 1.1kg (the 11″ Air weighs 1.08kg). The two are so similar, in fact, that once or twice during the several weeks of the review period, we actually mistook the Chromebook lying around our office for the MacBook Air we use as our primary laptop.

Of course, once you get a bit closer to the Chromebook, you start to notice differences that tell you that the Chromebook is a significantly cheaper laptop than the Air. For starters, the Chromebook’s casing is composed of a silver plastic material rather than the MacBook’s aluminium. Its hinge, its keys, the little coverings over some of its ports and even its screen contributes to a feeling that this isn’t a premium laptop, but rather something from lower down in the market.

None of this is bad, however. The Chromebook retails in Australia for a recommended retail price of $349. The MacBook Air starts at three times that price — $1,099. Yet there’s only a moderate difference in physical build quality between the two models, and we’d say that most people who picked up the two laptops side by side wouldn’t see a huge difference in quality between the pair, physical design-wise. The MacBook Air is a much nicer machine design-wise than the Chromebook, but the difference between the pair in terms of their build quality online doesn’t really justify the Air’s increased $750 price tag.

In terms of Samsung’s other design choices with the Chromebook, what you’ll mainly notice is that this is quite a minimalistic device. On its left-hand side you get the unit’s 3.5mm headphone jack (which can also take a microphone line in), alongside its 3-in-1 plastic card slot (it takes SD, SDHC and SDXC options). There’s nothing on the laptop’s right-hand side, while on its back it features a small port for attaching the unit’s power brick, next to a HDMI out port, one USB 3.0 port, and one USB 2.0 port. And there’s a couple of small speaker grills on the bottom.

The unit comes with 2GB of DDR3L RAM running at 800MHz, an 11.6″ HD LED display which can display a resolution of 1366 by 768, and storage space is provided by a 16GB eMMC card. Yup, you read that right — there’s no hard disk to speak of here, so you won’t be storing your entire MP3 collection on the Chromebook. Graphics memory is also quite limited as it’s shared with the main system RAM.

There’s a 3W stereo speaker (consisting of two 1.5W units), a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera, and an internal mic for videoconferencing duties. And of course the Chromebook supports the 802.11 a/b/g standards for Wi-Fi access.

There’s no Ethernet port, so this is a wireless-only device. There’s no Bluetooth and no VGA out port — you’re limited to HDMI. However, there’s also no fan on the CPU or other chipsets — meaning the Chromebook runs completely silently. Its battery is a two-cell model at 30Wh.
There is a hidden port on the unit’s back for a SIM card for 3G mobile broadband — but we don’t even want to guess how or whether that will work in Australia, especially given the unit’s Chrome OS operating system.

And while we’re on that operating system, let’s go into it a little bit. What precisely can the Chromebook do and not do? Apart from its different CPU architecture, which doesn’t really manifest itself much to the end user, the Chrome OS is the main aspect of the Chromebook which will tell the end user that this really isn’t a stereotypical Windows or Mac laptop.

When we were testing our unit, we got a number of questions from friends and family about the Chromebook — especially considering that the model is being heavily advertised in some places such as Sydney’s Pitt St Mall at the moment. After attempting to explain the Chromebook to a few people in more detail, we settled on the quick and easy answer: “All it does is have the Chrome web browser. It’s a laptop which is 100 percent focused on its web browser.”

This is the easiest way to understand the Chromebook. When you log into the laptop (which you do by logging into your Google account), you are presented with a set of standard Google apps — ranging from Chrome itself, which functions as a fully fledged web browser, the same as it does on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, to YouTube, Gmail, Google Docs and so on. All of these apps open within the Chrome browser itself — they’re just new tabs or new windows.

One feature which really sold us on the unit was the way that it auto-populates web apps such as Chrome with your existing Google login. So, for example, if you go to the YouTube app, you’ll find yourself logged into YouTube and your channel subscriptions right there. This is the way that Google’s Android operating system (especially on stock Android devices such as the Nexus 4) works as well on mobiles, and we normally like it, except when Gmail tries to take over our mobile contacts. It works well on the Chromebook too. In addition, you can also ‘reset’ the Chromebook back to its basic install state — as you can with Android. We really liked this feature ported from Google’s mobile operating system and wish other laptop manufacturers would pick it up.

Of course, you will find yourself asking yourself, when using the Chromebook, whether Chrome OS is really a feature — or whether it’s a lack of a feature. If you compare Chrome OS to modern hard disk-based operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X or even Linux (or indeed, to mobile operating systems such as iOS, Android or Windows Phone 8), what you’ll quickly realise is how limited Chrome OS really is. Sure, you can do most tasks in 2013 through a web browser, but there are many, many tasks that you can’t do through a browser, and a lot of software that is best run on a normal hard disk and not from the cloud.

Your writer came into this review expecting a similar experience from the Chromebook to the sort of experience netbooks delivered several years ago. Most things are possible on netbooks, but not really fun. Low-powered CPUs, limited hard disk space and a cut-down operating system tends to result in users reaching instead for their traditional heavy laptops. And in a world increasingly populated by Apple’s popular light and thin MacBook Air laptops (at least amongst our peer group), one doesn’t even really need to sacrifice power for mobility these days — or power for weight.

However, what we found when actually using Samsung’s Chromebook was something quite different. The device’s simplicity and very strong integration with Google services that we use everyday such as Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, YouTube and so on meant that in an office filled with half a dozen smartphones, tablets, laptops and even desktop PCs, the Chromebook rapidly found its niche as the quickest device to reach for for quick access with a full-sized keyboard to these kinds of Google services.

Don’t get me wrong — the current crop of ultrabooks, smartphones and tablets on the market do a great job of providing access to the Internet in all its forms. However, if you mainly want to use Google services for lightly browsing and consuming content, and if you want to do so while using a device which sits easily on any surface due to its laptop form factor, with the additional desire for a full-sized keyboard, then the Chromebook is likely to become your go-to gadget for that particular habit.