HP Chromebook 11 review

When you sit down and think about how you use your laptop, you’d probably be surprised at how little you use actual applications and how reliant you are on the internet and online services. The question is, do you really need a full-on Windows or Mac laptop, if all you really need to do is use a browser? How about a Chromebook instead?

For the people that answer no to that question, Google believes it has the perfect product: the HP Chromebook 11. Rather than running a full Desktop OS, this £229 laptop uses Chrome OS, which runs all of its applications through the Chrome web browser, but adds in some slick offline modes for those times you can’t get online. It has to be said that at this price, it’s a very attractive option for a lot of people.

Low cost, often means corners have been cut and quality is lacking, but these pitfalls have been avoided here and we have to say that first impressions are incredibly positive. We’ve seen cheap laptops before, but none to quite have the same build quality as this. Yes, it’s plastic, but the metal-reinforced case means that it feels tough and there’s none of the creakiness that other low-cost Chromebooks have had. It also looks great, with the white gloss plastic neatly bevelled and curved, making the Chromebook 11 look a lot more expensive than it really is.

PERFORMANCE

Build quality is one thing, but there’s always the danger that corners are cut inside to save money and to keep the cost down. Fortunately, with the Chromebook 11 that isn’t the case, as the right choices have been made for the right reason.

So, it’s goodbye to the high-speed Intel Core i5 processor that was used in the high-end Chromebook Pixel, and hello to a dual-core Samsung Exynos 5 Dual ARM-based SoC instead. This move would be madness on a Windows-based laptop, but ChromeOS is designed for efficient CPUs.

We can’t run our usual benchmarks on the OS, but we ran the browser-based SunSpider test. This ran in 716ms, which puts the Chromebook 11 at fast Android-tablet speeds. We also ran the WebXPRT test, which returned a score of 324, which again is comparable to fast Android tablets. In other words, this laptop is more than fast enough for the web applications it’s designed for. There’s no worry about handling video, as the Exynos SoC will happily handle HD video. We managed to play both Netflix and Google Play Film content with no problem.

Perhaps more importantly, in actual use, the laptop is extremely responsive. All of ChromeOS’s animations are handled smoothly and apps start extremely quickly. Flick open the lid and the laptop powers on immediately. In this regard, we’re at Macbook-levels of power-on times.

CHROMEBOOK 11 SCREEN

HP has fitted a high-quality 11in IPS screen with a resolution of 1,366×768. Given that Chrome OS takes up very little of the screen space with clutter and that there’s a full-screen mode, this is plenty of resolution. On this screen size, everything looks incredibly sharp and easy to read.

A glossy coating means that reflections can be a bit of a problem at some brightness levels, but sat on a train next to a window we found that setting the screen to full brightness effectively countered this problem.

Viewing angles are fantastic and you can clearly see the screen no matter what angle you have it at. The screen doesn’t fold back 180-degrees, but you get enough of an angle on it that you can see if comfortably while the Chromebook 11 is sat on your lap. Colours look great, too, with plenty of vibrancy and detail in all of our test shots.

CHROMEBOOK 11 KEYBOARD AND TOUCHPAD

As there’s no touchscreen, the keyboard and touchpad are the only ways to interact with the laptop. Starting with the keyboard, we have to say that we’re impressed. It’s edge-to-edge inside the laptop, which means that each of the keys is a decent size.

While not quite on the level of the Macbook Air’s keyboard, we found that it was responsive and key travel was good. Feedback is pretty good, although we found that the keys are a little soft, so you need to make sure you hit them well. After a few minutes of getting used to it, we were soon touch typing at full speed.

Layout takes a little getting used to, as there are some new keys and some that are either missing or in a different place. For example, there’s a Search button where Capslock is traditionally located, while there’s no Delete key (instead you can press Alt-Backspace).

Google has added some ChromeOS shortcut keys to the top of the keyboard where the Function keys would normally be. These include buttons to go backwards and forwards in the browser, reload a page, go fullscreen and switch between different apps. There are also dedicated buttons for screen brightness, volume (including mute) and a power button.

A touchpad sits just underneath the keyboard. It’s a decent size considering the constraints of a laptop with an 11in screen. It’s intelligent, too, deactivating while you type, so that you don’t accidentally brush against it and move the mouse cursor; if only all Windows laptops would be so smart.

It supports some gestures, too. With a two-finger swipe you can go backwards or forwards in the browser, a two-fingered click is right-click, and you can also use it to scroll. We turned on the ‘Australian’ scrolling operation, which works exactly like on a Mac and a touchscreen tablet: you slide two fingers up on the touchpad to move down the screen, and down on the touchpad to move up through a document. It doesn’t support pinch to zoom, though, which is a bit of a shame.

CHROMEBOOK 11 BATTERY LIFE

A small laptop usually means a comparatively small battery, which can have an impact on battery life. In this case, though, that’s not so much of a problem, as the Samsung SoC is very power friendly. Google estimates that you’ll get up to six hours of battery life from the laptop. Using it for a full day of work, we managed over five hours, which is pretty good considering that the Chromebook 11 weighs just 1.04kg.

As our regular battery test doesn’t work on Chrome OS, we also measured how long the Chromebook 11 lasted playing a video, using its built-in media player. In this test the laptop lasted 5h 12m on a full charge.

Charging is simple, as it’s the first laptop we’ve seen that can be charged via its Micro USB port. Google provides a 3A charger in the box, which will rapidly charge the laptop, but you can trickle charge using a phone adaptor instead if you’ve forgotten yours. It also means that if your charger breaks, you don’t have to worry about buying an expensive replacement.

CHROMEBOOK 11 CHROME OS

Everything on the laptop is built around ChromeOS, Google’s ‘online’ operating system, which stores everything in the cloud. If you haven’t used it before, it’s built around Google’s Chrome web browser, its apps and Google’s services. All you need to use it is a Google account, which gets you a free Gmail address, Google Drive for Google Docs and a Google+ social networking account, which also doubles as a place to store your pics.

As everything is built around Chrome, you also get the same synchronisation as you get on the desktop version for Windows and Mac, which means that all of the usernames, passwords and apps you have on your browser on any OS are automatically synced with your Chromebook. It’s a brilliant system and means that you never have to back up or worry where installation disks are.

When the OS was first released, it didn’t make a huge amount of sense, as you had to be online to do anything. Today, the situation is rather different. For starters, it’s a lot easier to be online, with Wi-Fi available in most locations, plus fast mobile phone tethering giving you access everywhere else. In fact, we wrote the bulk of this review tethering the Chromebook 11 to an iPhone 5S and using 4G.

For those times that you have to be offline, there’s nothing to worry about, either, as more and more Chrome apps are now built to work offline. Google Drive documents are synchronised to your Chromebook and you can create and edit existing word processing Docs offline. Spreadsheets are less flexible at the moment, as you can only view, but not edit or create, files.

You can also connect USB drives or download existing word documents and photos, all of which can be accessed from your computer and are automatically synchronised to the cloud. You get 100GB of free storage for two years, so there should be plenty of room online for your documents.

However, you can’t store that much on your Chromebook 11, as it has only 16GB of storage and there’s no SD card slot to expand this. Fortunately, the synchronisation service is smart, so you’ll only get an offline copy of more recent files, without filling up your computer’s disk space.

Google Mail and your Calendar are both available offline, although in the case of Gmail you have to install a secondary offline app. This downloads your latest emails and lets you read and compose when your laptop is offline.

The list of offline apps is growing steadily and the Chrome Store even has its own Offline section, so you can find the ones that you want to use. There’s a decent range of online apps too, covering everything from social media to games. We wouldn’t say that the range is as good as, say, for Android, but as you’ve got a full web browser, this is arguably less important, as most of the services you need to access are online.

While on the desktop version of Chrome Apps are accessed through a dedicated button in a tab, on ChromeOS apps are available through the system’s own version of the Start Menu. Apps have their own launcher icons, but it’s a bit annoying that sometimes the names are too long, so they appear truncated. Google Play Music, Google Play Movies and Google Play Books all appear as Google Play…, for example. It’s possible to tell them apart based on the icon, but hovering the cursor over the icon really should show you the full name.

An easier way to find apps is to start typing into this menu instead. This provides universal search results from apps on your computer, files in Google Drive and recent emails. As it’s Google we’re talking about, the search results are both quick to come back an accurate.

Obviously, there are some limitations to the OS. For example, this isn’t right for people that want to edit a lot of video or photos offline, as there simply aren’t the tools or applications to do this. It’s also no good if you have to have a certain bit of software, such as Outlook.

CHROMEBOOK 11 CONCLUSION

ChromeOS is certainly coming of age and the Chromebook 11 is a great way to show off its capabilities. If you’re a proponent of Google’s services and want a quick laptop with a decent keyboard for basic office and online tasks, then this does the job for most people. We still think that offline mode needs a little work, as it’s a bit annoying having to have a separate Gmail app and a pain that you can’t edit offline spreadsheets. These niggles aside, the Chromebook 11 is an absolute bargain and shows how a netbook can be done properly.