Guest Post - Helen Collings

Review of Samsung Google Chromebook

I was really impressed by the Chromebook, it delivers a lot of positive features for such a reasonably priced machine. I loved the battery life and the web browsing facilities, obviously there are many things it can't do due to it's size and it doesn't compare to the bigger beefier laptops. But it beats any netbook I've used, and I would certainly consider buying it as a machine both for home and work. 

 

I thought I'd put some thoughts into bullet points for ease of reading:

 

Pros:

• Turns on really quickly - once signed in it takes seconds for it to be up and running.

• It has a good battery life for its size (especially when you've been using your iPhone a lot!), which it conserves by sleeping whenever it's unused, and it wakes up really quickly.

• It has a decent keyboard which has a good 'click' to the keys if you know what I mean. Long word processing is quite comfortable.

• It has USB and USB3 sockets, an HDMI output, SD card slot and 3.5 mm headphone jack.

• You can easily jump between search/email etc using the browser bar at the bottom.

• It has a good screen size, even if you're quite old and often have to squint at things!

• There are a variety of apps that can be pinne.

• Google docs is great!

• It has some offline functionality for docs and drive, and it will upload changes when you log back on.

• It is small and incredibly light, fits in most bags!

• It is silent when running.

Cons:

• Although there is an app store, and there is a good choice of apps, if you're used to Apple it's not quite so impressive.

• It has an odd right click function involving tapping with two fingers which takes a bit of getting used to.

• It doesn't cope too well with lots of browser tabs open, and sometimes video and photos are slow loading or viewing and long documents don't scroll too well.

Guest post written by: Helen Collings (IPACA, Southwell Campus)