Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsMy laptop and iPad are gonna get lonely
Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2013
I love my laptops (a beautiful Asus for personal use and a reliable Lenovo for work), and I've been a heavy iPad user since standing in line for the first generation model several years ago. Between laptop and iPad, I wasn't sure there was much space in the middle for a Chromebook. But, when I started reading the rave reviews of the next gen Samsung Chromebook, and when the price fell under two hundred and fifty bucks, I decided to give it a try.
And I love it! A huge percentage of my laptop/tablet use is for web browsing and emailing. The Chromebook is purpose-built for both. The Chrome browser works just like it does on my laptop, and being able to have multiple browser windows open is a very nice advantage over my iPad. As you'd expect, the Chromebook works beautifully with gmail, Google Voice, and Google Docs. I wish it ran Skype, but since I've been using Skype and Google video chat and Hangouts pretty interchangeably over the past year, so I don't really miss having Skpe on the Chromebook.
For emails longer than a short paragraph, the Chromebook is hugely more convenient than my iPad. I've always loved the convenience of the iPad, but responding to emails that required more than a sentence or two was a pain. In the week I've had the Chromebook, I'd bet my iPad use has dropped by 75%, mostly because I now use the Chromebook as my default email device.
I didn't expect to do much if any document creation on the Chromebook, but Google docs works so well that I've found myself using it for short documents (the equivalent of Word docs) and spreadsheets when it's not worth booting up my laptop. I hadn't used Google Docs before, and was very pleasantly surprised by how easy they are to use.
Printing: I have two HP printers at home. One is a bit over two years old, and the other is about a year old. Both are new enough to be ePrint compatible. Configuring the Chromebook to print to these printers took only a minute or two -- less time and work than configuring printers on a laptop. Printing to either printer from the Chromebook is just like printing from a laptop -- same dialogues and everything. Slick and simple.
Although the Samsung Chromebook will work for anybody, it really comes into its own if you're already embedded in the Google ecosystem. Gmail, Google docs, Google Voice, Google video chat, etc. are ridiculously easy to use on this Chromebook, as you'd expect.
In terms of specs, the Chromebook is noticeably lighter than my "thin and light" laptop. The screen is a bit smaller than I'd like -- comparable to the screen on my Lenovo X200 series business laptop, whereas I prefer a minimum 13" screen. But it's a reasonable tradeoff to get a small size, light weight, and great battery life.
The battery life has been a real surprise. I used the Chromebook Thursday night, all day Friday, and Saturday morning on a single battery charge before it shut down. The shut down was a bit startling (no warning), but because the Chromebook stores settings, and because the docs I was working on are all in the cloud, everything came back exactly as it was once I plugged in and restarted.
The Chromebook starts up very quickly, even when doing a complete reboot. I typically leave it running, and it goes to sleep after a while or when I close the lid. When I open the lid or swipe the touchpad, it comes back to life in about two seconds. This is close enough to instant that I never feel like I'm waiting for the computer to start up. The experience is much closer to using an iPad than a laptop in this regard.
And the price is a bargain. A tablet with a keyboard would cost significantly more. (Speaking of price, the cost of this product on Amazon goes up and down dramatically because the device is still in very short supply as of Feb 2013 and stocks out regularly. If you see a price over two fifty, and you're not in a big hurry, wait a week or two and it's likely to fall back to that level.)
Bottom line: I couldn't really see why I'd want a Chromebook in addition to my laptop and tablet, but this device actually fits very nicely into a gap between those products. My laptop is bigger, bulkier, and power hungry; and my iPad is great, but is limited without an external keyboard (at which point it's clunkier than the Chromebook) and too expensive to upgrade regularly. The Chromebook has the efficiency, portability, and battery life of an iPad, but with a very nice keyboard at a fraction of the cost.
By the way ... a few years ago, I bought a "netbook" for many of the same reasons that attracted me to the Chromebook. But the netbook turned out to be slow (it was Windows based) with a bad keyboard and terrible battery life. The Samsung isn't like the old netbooks, which were basically ultra-cheap laptops. Instead, it's a very sleek machine optimized for web browsing, emailing, and Google apps (Google docs, Google video, Google voice, etc.). In a world that's going to the cloud, I have a feeling that laptops are quickly going to become horse-drawn wagons.
