Acer Chromebook C710-2457

It's become abundantly clear at this point that Chrome OS isn't going anywhere. Google's foray into browser-driven computing is more than an experiment: Chromebooks are still hanging on in the fringes of the laptop market, and even gaining in number. So let's accept their existence, even if you don't necessarily believe in them.

For example, the Chromebook Pixel is a fine-feeling Chromebook...that costs $1,299. But Google really needs great Chromebooks at $300.

If you look in a retail circular or browse online sales, that cheap sub-$200 laptop that looks like a Netbook is probably a Chromebook nowadays -- if you aren't already looking at a tablet. But have things really changed from a year ago?

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

The Acer C710-2457 shows that the real changes in most Chromebooks aren't likely to be about the hardware, but about the evolution of Chrome OS itself. As a product, the "new" C7 looks a lot like the old C7 we reviewed last year, which in turn felt like an old Netbook outfitted with Chrome.

Bargain-hunters might like the simplicity of the C7, but you're still not getting something in terms of hardware that's going to beat most laptops or even cheap tablets, unless you really value a keyboard-and-touch-pad experience over touchscreen tapping. I'd recommend a cheap tablet like the Nexus 7 or spending a little more for a real-deal sub-$500 laptop, over a bargain-basement Chromebook.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Design
Close your eyes. Open them. That Acer C7 sitting in front of you is a Netbook, isn't it? Of course it is. It even has an old VGA port sticking out the side.

Plastic, generic, utilitarian: the C7 fits all these descriptors. It won't win a beauty contest, but it packs up compactly, and its power adapter is small.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

The plastic body feels undeniably budget, without the often more premium touches of many tablets. A somewhat flexible plastic top lid, glossy plastic screen bezel, and thicker-than-you'd-expect sides with ugly vent grilles complete the portrait of a product that defies any desire to show it off. I said exactly the same thing about the last C7 I reviewed, because they're basically exactly the same.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Like all Chromebooks (except the Pixel), the Acer C7 lacks a touch screen. You'll be interacting solely with the keyboard and touch pad, which are fair and subpar, respectively. The keyboard's raised, island-style chiclet keys have the same travel and shape as found in many ultrabooks, but no backlighting. Typing feels comfortable enough, with no unnecessary columns of keys on the sides. You do have to get used to the Chromebook keyboard conventions, which are subtly different: a search key marked with a magnifying glass icon is installed between the Alt and Fn keys, but the function buttons all work directly to raise and lower volume or change screen brightness, a nice plus. The keyboard feels nearly full-size.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

The clickable touch pad, well, that's another story. It works reasonably well enough for basic one-finger navigation around Chrome OS, but for two-finger scrolling or multifinger gestures, it's lousy. There's no inertial scrolling, so Web page browsing becomes herky-jerky. Tap-and-drag moves were also hard to pull off consistently. It's a far cry from the smooth feel of better-made laptops or the touch screen on any tablet. And, in the 10 or so months since I last reviewed the Acer C7, it's even less impressive compared with the wonderful feel, say, of the Chromebook Pixel's touch pad. Good touch pads can be done on Chromebooks, just not on this one.

Display and speakers: Less than optimal
Look, this is a $199 device at heart. Still, tablets like the Nexus 7 manage impressive display quality in this price range. The 11.6-inch 1,366x768-pixel-resolution display on the Acer C7 matches what you'd expect on a standard laptop, but it lacks vibrant screen brightness or colors, and images wash out at extreme viewing angles. The glossy surface throws a lot of glare, too.

The speakers don't help. Generic speakers under the chassis generate faint audio that makes your favorite movie's soundtrack sound like it's pumped from an AM radio. Heaphones are a must, but either way this isn't a killer way to watch media on the go: you're better off packing a smartphone. For e-mail and basic reading/productivity, it's a better bet.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Configurations, performance, battery life
The base $199 Acer C7 on the Google Play store has an Intel Celeron dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM and a 16GB SSD. Our review version has 4GB of RAM and costs $229 -- it's sold via Acer, at retail, and on other online sites.

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Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook

Try to sell most of us a laptop that can't run normal programs, never mind traditional operating systems such as Windows 8 or OS X, and instead only runs a web browser - forcing you to do everything online - and we'd hesitate.

ut that's precisely what a Chromebook like the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook is; a laptop that boots into the lightweight operating system Chrome OS, where all you can do is launch Google's Chrome web browser.

It might sound like a product that nobody in their right mind would buy, but there are two reasons why it's not as clear cut as that. The first is that we've actually come to quite like Chromebooks here at TechRadar, and not just because they're cheap - we'll come to why shortly.

The other reason, though, is that what started as a tiny dribble of models and manufacturers has turned if not into a torrent then into a steady trickle. Of course just because we're seeing an increasing number of Chromebooks hit the market it doesn't mean they must be successful, but PC manufacturers wouldn't bother making and marketing Chromebooks if they didn't think there was at least a potential market.

Now HP's Pavilion 14 Chromebook joins the slightly cheaper, slim, light and ARM-powered Samsung Chromebook, the cheaper still Acer C7 Chromebook with its 320GB hard disk, and the hugely more expensive, beautifully designed Google Chromebook Pixel with its high-res 3:2 screen.

Four Chromebooks compared to the many hundreds of Windows laptops or even the nearly dozen basic Apple MacBooks doesn't sound like much, but it still feels like a sector that's getting to be cautiously optimistic.

If you decide you want to buy a Chromebook or you just want a reliable, genuinely usable laptop with a price tag of just £249 / AU$399 / US$329.99, the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook distinguishes itself from the other models with a bigger, 14-inch screen.

Chrome OS won't suit everyone. It may not even suit most people yet, but it's true that it's constantly evolving, and so are our computing habits and needs. So while you can't currently do video editing, professional photography editing or coding on a Chromebook - although online services are springing up that at least begin to address these demands - many of us would cope fine with just a web browser.

Think about what you do on a traditional PC, for example, and there's a good chance either that you do essentially everything through a browser anyway - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, webmail - or that those things that you currently do with regular apps such as Word and Excel could be replaced with web services such as Google Docs.

You might think, that's all very well, but if these are all web apps, I have to be online to use them, and since the Pavilion 14 doesn't have a SIM card slot for 3G mobile browsing, it's just a useless door-stop when I can't get Wi-Fi access. But as we'll see, that's not quite the case.

Let's start, though, with the specs. Now, specs with a Chromebook mean a little less than they do with normal laptops, so we can't just put a Chromebook next to a laptop from Lenovo, Asus, Dell or even HP and say that because it has a weaker processor, less storage, a lower-res screen and fewer, lower-specced ports that it's worse.

That's because, since Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system whose only job is to run a browser - albeit a fast, capable browser with support for complex HTML 5 and Flash - the hardware needs comparatively little oomph to do its job well.

The HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook has an Intel Celeron 847 processor running at 1.1GHz at its heart, and the 14-c002sa model we tested had 4GB of RAM.

Storage is courtesy of a 16GB SSD, which we think is the right choice; the 320GB hard disk in the Acer C7 is a bit redundant in a computer that's designed to be a thin client to web services, and because hard disks are slower than solid-state drives, all it did was slow the overall responsiveness of the machine down.

Put together, nothing about these core specs suggest anything other than pedestrian performance, but in fact they're more than sufficient for a Chromebook. The HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook feels slick and fast and responsive, and it coped well with everything we threw at it.

There are three USB 2.0 ports - no, no USB 3.0, but that's totally fine, since a Chromebook would have no real use for a faster connection, at least in its current incarnation - and an HDMI port, which is extra useful now that Chrome OS supports extended desktop view as well as mirroring on an external monitor.

There's also a combined mic/headphone jack, a full-depth SD card slot and, as well as 802.11a/b/g/n, a very welcome Ethernet port.

The built-in webcam is, as you'd expect, HD resolution. But as you'd expect, 'HD' does not necessarily equate to 'high quality'.

Although the 14-inch screen is low-res by today's standards at 1366 x 786, and is a little washed out with poor viewing angles, we have seen worse, and we have to remember that this is in a £250 / AU$400 / US$330 laptop.

Weighing 1.8kg (4lbs), it's not ultrabook-light, but it's not going to break your back when slung in a laptop bag.

One thing that's flat-out bad on the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook, though, is the battery. The battery takes up just a sliver of this 14-inch laptop's spacious body.

When battery life is so poor as it is here - giving somewhere between three and four hours of solid use, or perhaps a little more if you're lucky - and space in the chassis isn't at a premium as it would be with an ultrabook or a netbook, we can't help but feel cheated when HP has stuck a meagre 4-cell Li-Ion battery in.

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Review: Updated: Samsung Chromebook

This is technically the fifth iteration of the Google Chromebook – so long as you count Google's own CR-48 prototype.

Despite being the fifth Chromebook, this Samsung Chromebook (formerly known as the Series 3 XE303C12) shouldn't be confused with the Samsung Chromebook 550

If you know about Chrome OS already, you'll know that this laptop isn't like mainstream Windows laptops or even machines such as the Apple MacBook Air or the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Though it struggled with HD, SD video streams play perfectly well; no downloads, though

It doesn't run a conventional operating system such as Windows 8, Mac OS X Mountain Lion or even a straight Linux distro such as Ubuntu.

Instead, it is essentially a computer that does one thing: run a web browser.

In this case, of course, the web browser in question is Google Chrome.

Deciding whether or not the Samsung Chromebook is right for you is actually really easy. The first thing you have to know is that it's cheap. Really cheap.

The Chromebook is a great machine to take to a café to get some work done

At a launch price of £229/USD$330/AU$319, it undercuts most conventional laptops, and is cheaper even than the new iPad mini – though it's more expensive than the low-end Android tablets such as the Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

That's only part of the decision, however.

The other – indeed, main – thing you have to consider is whether you can live with a laptop that only runs everything in a browser, and therefore, with some caveats, depends on being connected to the web at all times over Wi-Fi.

There's no doubt that this is a Chromebook – look at that huge Chrome logo on the lid!

It's not hard to decide if this is something you can live with; take a moment, close your eyes, and think whether what you mostly do on a computer is done through a browser – or could be.

Because while you can install apps from the Chrome Web Store they're not really applications or programs as most of us would recognise them.

In fact, they're little more than links that sit in your launcher and point to URLs on the web. (Actually, it's a little more complex than that; web apps can, if their developers implement it, add extra features such as using local storage on your Chromebook, rather than solely depending on storage on the servers of the companies whose services you're using.)

Regardless of the technical caveats, however, it remains true that you can't install, say, Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop Elements on a Chromebook. That's not what the Chromebook is about.

You need two hands to open the Chromebook; the hinge is reasonably stiff

It's a slim, light, cheap, long-lasting little laptop that, partly because really the only thing it does is run a web browser and isn't based on Windows, is very secure, and if you live your life in web apps such as Facebook and Google Docs (or think you could), or especially if you are already immersed in the Google ecosystem of Docs, Gmail, Calendars and more, it's worth considering.

It comes with 100 GB of Google Drive free for 2 years.

Some applications such as Google Docs can work offline even if there's no Wi-Fi

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