The Samsung Chromebook 11-Inch Review: A Budget-Friendly Option with Some Caveats

Don't see really smooth performance but it really gets the job done and it's kind of similar to the Samsung Chromebook uh so for example we can click on one of these videos play back the video in the browser so as you can see that video playback is sort of slowing down performance let's go ahead and maximize this and see how it looks. Purge oven I guess you want to call it so playm is pretty smooth here I don't see any frame dropping or performance issues in any way River because the rivers were the 11in Chromebook is actually similar in form factor to the 11-in MacBook Air they even have the same screen resolution uh but of course the MacBook Air is made out of aluminum has a much larger solid state hard drive has a 720p front-facing camera versus the VGA camera here.

has a full backlit keyboard with a glass trackpad this is all plastic of course and does not have back lighting uh neither computer our touchscreen of course uh and as you can see if you tilt the screen down uh this gives you an idea of the off access performance now you can see there's more glare here on the 11in Chromebook versus the MacBook Air but the MacBook Air has worse off axis Hing because it's using a TN display instead of an IPS display so actually I think this display looks better it's not as bright as the MacBook Air so I have the screen at full brightness here uh same with the MacBook Air you can see that the MacBook Air is still a bit brighter now this keyboard actually feels pretty good if feels pretty rigid pretty solid but it does kind of bottom out a little harshly it doesn't really have a nice spring to it so when you're typing it doesn't really feel as high quality as again something like the Chromebook Pixel or the MacBook Air.

Now there is one Achilles heel for the Chromebook 11in and that is battery life so we can expect about 5 hours of battery life out of this uh now something like the MacBook Air can get about 9 hours thanks to the Haswell processor so this definitely doesn't have the best battery life and for a lot of people that may not be good enough now the other limitation here is you only get 16 gigs of on board storage but when you purchase a Chromebook you do get for 2 years 100 gigs of Google storage so you can use cloud storage in lie of onboard storage.

Now of course we do have two USB 2.0 ports here which means that you could use an external hard drive if you prefer now in terms of the quality of the construction it's definitely not a high-end laptop and for example you can kind of bend it so it kind of flexes and bends it's not a rigid laptop you can kind of feel that the hinge around the display is a little loose kind of creaks and that sort thing so it doesn't really feel like a quality laptop but again you're paying $279 but the display is beautiful I really like the display I'm actually surprised by how good it looks especially if you're used to a MacBook Air which is a high-end laptop but doesn't quite have the off AIS Vie or the Deep contrast level of this display it's not as bright but it's definitely a pretty good display.

The display has that VJ camera which is pretty mediocre you kind of expect 720p this day and age uh the keyboard is not back lit which I didn't expect but it would be nice but I think a white uh keyboard makes it a little more visible that trackpad feels pretty nice it does feel a little stickier than something like the Chromebook Pixel or the glass trackpad on the MacBook Air but it does a pretty nice job and it's pretty responsive you can see this glossy finish along the side which doesn't feel great in your palm but it's not too bad uh and the design is really nice so for example when you close it up I really like the seamless design no screws or anything like that again it resembles the mac book from a few years ago that white MacBook have that nice long hinge with that uh uh ventless design so it doesn't have any fans so it's a completely quiet experience and it's a really nice cheap laptop that gets the job done but of course you do have to work within the limits of the Chrome operating system and it gets better every day but certainly isn't for everybody you can't install certain games you can't install certain apps you do really have to be able to work within the limits of a web browser so that's something to keep in mind.

But overall, if you're in the market for a Chromebook I see no reason not to take a look at the HP Chromebook and as I mentioned earlier it is a pretty good display and gets the job done well, even if it doesn't have some of the bells and whistles that more expensive laptops offer.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys Mike here the Detroit Borg with the HP Chromebook 11 this is the new 11-in Chromebook from HP there's also an HP4 but this is the cheapest one and probably going to be the biggest volume seller Chromebook but again this is kind of a compact lightweight inexpensive laptop powered by the Chrome OS you can see the packaging here is quite nice made with Google so this was designed with Google so HP has partnered with Google on this product so obviously this is the product that Google wants to highlight all right so let's just move these end pieces and we can take a look at this rather nice packaging they've done here so you can see it's kind of a paper product but it looks like it's a plastic shell really nicely done uh you have a little wrapper here to peel off so let's go ahead and do that right on the back you can see a new type of computer again referring to Chrome OS and there we go Google branding right on the packaging all right so I'm just going to lift this tab here and that removes the plastic and you can see we have these tabs right here to cut so let's go ahead and do that all right so let's go ahead and lift this lid pops off and there we go there is our HP Chromebook you see on the inside cover Chrome and there it is in its sort of cradle here with this little plastic handle to pull up to free it from its packaging so there you go it actually reminds me a lot of the plastic MacBook uh the regular MacBook that was discontinued last year looks very sharp now on the inside we find pretty basic LC here so hi there let's get started all you have to do is turn on your Chromebook pick your wireless network and sign in with your Google account or create one on the back we have some of the apps that are available with Chrome OS so we have the web browser obviously this is a computer powered by the Chrome web browser we create a new documents so you can author documents on this you also have video chatting music you have Google Drive for offline storage uh we also have uh instruction manuals built into the OS and we have an app store for the Chrome OS now inside we'll find our wall charger and something very interesting here is the fact that this is powered and charged by micro USB so you can charge your laptop with micro USB so you can see our power adapter here can peel this open to reveal it so there we have it we have the power adapter and kind of this matte black finish now we also have this quick start guide just tells you a little bit about setting up your Chromebook for the first time how to charge it what the buttons do that sort of thing and we're going to explore some of that here all right so let's go ahead and unpack our HP Chromebooks we have this little sleeve here that peels off the envelope should slide right off or it's going to be stuck to the rubber on the inside here so let's go ahead and break this open all right slides right out all right so let's go and take a look at the design and as you can see to me it looks a lot like a plastic MacBook it's got that same sort of rounded Edge to it uh both on the lid as well as the bottom here you can see the front has more of a taper toward the front there is no thumb nail port to lift up the lid so it kind of feels a little hard to get in there to open up the lid not too bad along the back you'll find that Chrome Strip This is a design feature that we saw with the pixel now in this case it's just backl it's back lit by the backlight of the display so it doesn't have its own LED Row in here like you got with the Chromebook Pixel along the side you'll find your two USB 2.0 ports no USB 3.0 ports in this case like you got with the Samsung Chromebook you also have your headphone jack your micro USB charging port along with an LED indicator up there Amber for charging green for fully charged you also see your hinge here which again looks a lot like a Macbook uh so it's almost the full width of the back you can see we have that space here for operating the hinge there are no vents or fans in this design so it's a pretty quiet laptop uh along the bottom you'll see the foot so the this is the rubber foot and as you can see it's color keyed or color matched to the uh sort of accent color that's also around the keyboard which I'll show you uh now these are Google colors so we have blue green yellow as well as red you also have the black version so you can get an all black model if you prefer something like that down here you can see made with Google with HP branding now if you look along the bottom you'll find there are no screws here so it's a pretty seamless design but this back panel can come off uh but it's not really meant to be pulled off by the user this is a magnesium chassis behind this plastic so there is a metal chassis behind this plastic which supports all the components inside all right so let's go ahead and lift our lid here we should find a piece of paper protecting the keyboard from the screen so so we'll remove that here looks like it's tucked into the hinge there we go now on the inside we'll find our blue accent color framing the keyboard now the speakers are behind the keyboard so you don't see any grills or vents or anything like that we find our multi-touch trackpad here you see that the uh surface the Palm rest surface is a smooth glossy plastic now taking a look at our display you can see it's framed in this sort of matte plastic and that really was the first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that we have this sort of low grade plastic surrounding this glossy display the display is actually very similar to the one on the MacBook Air this is an IPS display good off access viewing has a resolution of 1366 X 768 again it's the same uh Dimensions 11.6 in it's kind of a wide screen we have our VGA camera up here so not 720p just VGA we have an ambient light sensor as well as our microphone we have our Chrome branding down below you can see that looks pretty nice now if you look really closely at the hinge again it resembles a Macbook in many ways you can see a full width hinge here along with our bezel around the side uh so if you close it up you can see it's pretty tight you don't see any uh grills down here so like the MacBook Air which requires a fan uh you don't see any grills uh sort of exposed when you open up the hinge it's pretty uh tight all right so it looks like it's shipped to me with a battery completely discharged so I'm going to go ahead and connect my power supply so you can see I get a little amber light indicating that it's charging so let's go ahead and see if we can Boot It Up all right so I'm going to hit the power button now the great thing about a Chromebook is the fact that it boots up really quickly it's using flash storage again 16 gigs of flash storage has 2 gigs of RAM this is running a uh cortex a15 dual core processor clocked at 1.7 GHz again that's very similar I think it's actually identical to the outgoing Samsung Chromebook all right so let's go ahead and set this up I can select my language my keyboard and I can select a network so let's go ahead to my time capsule here now Chrome updates will automatically be installed when you set up your laptop for the first time all right so the next thing it wants me to do is choose a picture and I can see that the picture from my Google+ profile is already here but I can go ahead and take a picture right now if I prefer but I'm just going to go with that one click okay all right so if you're new to the Chromebook here is your chance to explore it now you get this tutorial page full of guys so for example how to add apps there is an app store here how to work offline so you can work offline all those is this is still pretty dependent on internet access so uh you can edit documents offline can read email offline but most things require online access because you're using a web browser uh you can also print from here so you can connect your printer and this explains how to do that we also have for example some keyboard and touchpad tips and tricks uh the keyboard uh tip and trick is pretty useful because for example there is no caps lock key here so if you're not familiar with Chromebooks in order to enable caps lock you hit the alt search buttons as you can see right here there's some other Tri uh tips here as well such as taking screenshots or taking partial screenshots because you don't have something like print screen and other Keys you're used to on Windows or Mac laptops all right so let's go and take a look at the basics of using your Chromebook so in the lower right corner you'll find uh your time your wireless status your battery as well as your account information if you click on that you get to more settings so you can see a quick view of your account so you could sign out and sign in as a new user which will transfer their account information to this computer you also have your wireless status so it takes you to your wireless uh so you can sign into a different account your blet bluetoth so you can enable Bluetooth and attach accessories like a Bluetooth keyboard you have your volume controls as well as your settings so if you want to go to your settings just hit that takes you to your full settings page and as you can see takes you to the web browser so again this is Chrome takes you to the Chrome browser and you can see it's a tab and everything and you can see all your bookmarks have synced across the top up here as well uh so all I had to do was log into my Google account and everything is here very simple now you can see all the options that are available to you including the users you can go to advanced settings to see more information here so you can see date and time you can select what time zone you're in looks like it's chosen the wrong time zone for me so let me go to Eastern Standard Time you also have your privacy settings Bluetooth passwords and forms uh your web content such as font size page zooms uh so I said it to 100% here which is default you can choose your language you can choose your download location so you can download files to this and change its location so you do have a file browser on this uh you have your U manage certifications for https Google Cloud Print so you can manage your cloud printing from here as well now on Startup I can also tell it what to do so for example I can have it open a new tab page I can have it continue where I last left off which is what I prefer or you can open a specific set of pages and you can go ahead and set those pages here I also have some accessibility options uh you have power wash which will remove all user accounts and reset your Chrome to a factory you also have reset browser settings so you can go ahead and reset that if you've changed all this and you want to go back to the default configuration now you can also manage your extensions here so again this is Chrome so you can install all of your extensions and yes I do have ad block you have a calculator you have the camera app some other things I've installed including chomecast so this does chomecast tabs to your chomecast on your TV as well now in our lower left corner we'll find our launcher right now I just have three apps or bookmarks if you really want to call these apps they're pretty much bookmarks because they open up inside the Chrome browser so you can see we can launch Chrome as you hover it over it you can see that they light up for you and tell you what they are uh so we can launch Chrome opens up a window now if we go ahead and launch Gmail it basically opens up in another tab so let me zoom out to show you this let's go ahead and launch Gmail there you go and we can also launch Maps as well if we go to our appid we can load more of our apps so we can launch YouTube and we can launch Google Drive and we can continue opening them all up uh now you can see up here we can close individual tabs as well now if you want to pin some of these items to your launch you can do that as well basically you use the right click gesture which is a two finger tap so for example if I want YouTube to appear on my launcher just right click and I can say pin to launcher there it is now it's in my launcher I also have other options here so for example I could have it as a pin tab I can open it up as a separate window or I can open up maximize so all of these are options which you can select and they stay fixed uh no matter where you are so for example if I select open eyes maximize every time I open up YouTube it will maximize the window so let me go ahead and close this tab for YouTube try opening up YouTube now there you go fills up the entire window if I don't want that behavior to happen all the time I can say open as a regular tab now something unique to the Chromebook experience is the way windows are managed so if you go up here you can see you can close your window or you can go up here to sort of either left justify your window right justify it or minimize it so if you go to minimize it it kind of takes it back to your dock if you go back to your dock you can maximize that window uh you can also just hit that box and it sort of minimi minimizes it enough so you can see your desktop here so you can basically get that standard Windows Experience now we do have an app store here so if we go to the App Store you can see apps optimized for the Chrome OS now you can see all of the apps available here and they're broken down into their respective categories so we have Google Drive and as you can see here if you look in the upper left corner you see that check mark that indicates I already have it installed uh so you can see other things I haven't installed including Outlook so there is an Outlook version for Chrome OS Spotify Sumo paint Kindle Cloud Reader you can see lots and lots of things here optimized for uh the Chrome OS so let's go ahead and install something here let's go ahead and use Gmail offline so there is an offline app for Gmail which I haven't tried yet so let's go ahead and install that so we're going to confirm that add and as you can see it's added to my app drawer so if I launch that here so basically this preloads all of my Gmail this means that I can be disconnected from my wireless network and still be able to click on all of my email to view it now if you have open tabs and you want to jump to them you just tap on one of your icons below here of course you do have to have them in your launcher and as you close them you can see that the light underneath the icon disappears so for example if I close the YouTube tab that goes out if I close the map tab that goes out and if I close the Gmail tab that also goes out now for the most part the Chromebook keyboard is pretty familiar so we have our volume controls up here including mute we have our power button up in the upper right corner we have our screen brightness controls up here now we have our Escape key here we have these navigation keys for for example going back backward or forward in our web history we also have this refresh button now we have two buttons here one is for maximizing your window and another one is for tabing between your open Windows now the trackpad is a pretty good size and we have that two finger gesture to scroll or that two finger gesture to right click on an item now we have a single click button here so we don't have a left-and or right hand click side it's just one single click here and it clicks more toward the bottom than the top now this Google themed light strip across the back this is becoming a Google Chrome trademark you'll see this on the Chrome pixel now with the Chrome pixel it's a dedicated light bar it actually has its own LEDs and it's able to change its own color do a whole light show and that sort of thing this is just back lit by the display and it's actually kind of hard to see unless you have the lights off once you turn the lights off you can see it so it's kind of dim here but it's kind of nice to have it now of course with Google we have Google doc so if you need a word processor or spreadsheet app that's built in of course that launches within the web browser so it's not a pre-installed app and you do need to have access to Internet in order for this to work now we have a host of media options from Google including Play Music as well as movies so if we go to Google Play movies we can launch that again it launches in a web browser not a dedicated app all right so we can go ahead and play back our video we can go to full screen mode now playback of video is really smooth with no frame dropping and the speakers are superb they're much better than I expected excellent stereo sound coming out of the speakers from the keyboard all right so let's go and take a look at the performance of the web browser now of course this is Chrome so it does have flash so you can use Flash on this laptop all right so I've loaded the version as you can see performance isn't the best here you don't see a lot of checkerboarding but you don't see really smooth performance but it really gets the job done and it's kind of similar to the Samsung Chromebook uh so for example we can click on one of these videos play back the video in the browser so as you can see that video playback is sort of slowing down performance let's go ahead and maximize this and see how it looks Purge oven I guess you want to call it so playm is pretty smooth here I don't see any frame dropping or performance issues in any way River because the rivers were the 11in Chromebook is actually similar in form factor to the 11-in MacBook Air they even have the same screen resolution uh but of course the MacBook Air is made out of aluminum has a much larger solid state hard drive has a 720p front-facing camera versus the VGA camera here has a full backlit keyboard with a glass trackpad this is all plastic of course and does not have back lighting uh neither computer our touchscreen of course uh and as you can see if you tilt the screen down uh this gives you an idea of the off access performance now you can see there's more glare here on the 11-in Chromebook versus the MacBook Air but the MacBook Air has worse off axis Hing because it's using a TN display instead of an IPS display so actually I think this display looks better it's not as bright as the MacBook Air so I have the screen at full brightness here uh same with the MacBook Air you can see that the MacBook Air is still a bit brighter now this keyboard actually feels pretty good if feels pretty rigid pretty solid but it does kind of bottom out a little harshly it doesn't really have a nice spring to it so when you're typing it doesn't really feel as high quality as again something like the Chromebook Pixel or the MacBook Air now there is one Achilles heel for the Chromebook 11in and that is battery life so we can expect about 5 hours of battery life out of this uh now something like the MacBook Air can get about 9 hours thanks to the Haswell processor so this definitely doesn't have the best battery life and for a lot of people that may not be good enough now the other limitation here is you only get 16 gigs of on board storage but when you purchase a Chromebook you do get for 2 years 100 gigs of Google storage so you can use cloud storage in lie of onboard storage now of course we do have two USB 2.0 ports here which means that you could use an external hard drive if you prefer now in terms of the quality of the construction it's definitely not a high-end laptop and for example you can kind of bend it so it kind of flexes and bends it's not a rigid laptop you can kind of feel that the hinge around the display is a little loose kind of creaks and that sort thing so it doesn't really feel like a quality laptop but again you're paying $279 but the display is beautiful I really like the display I'm actually surprised by how good it looks especially if you're used to a MacBook Air which is a high-end laptop but doesn't quite have the off AIS Vie or the Deep contrast level of this display it's not as bright but it's definitely a pretty good display of course it has that VJ camera which is pretty mediocre you kind of expect 720p this day and age uh the keyboard is not back lit which I didn't expect but it would be nice but I think a white uh keyboard makes it a little more visible that trackpad feels pretty nice it does feel a little stickier than something like the Chromebook Pixel or the glass trackpad on the MacBook Air but it does a pretty nice job and it's pretty responsive you can see this glossy finish along the side which doesn't feel great in your palm but it's not too bad uh and the design is really nice so for example when you close it up I really like the seamless design no screws or anything like that again it resembles the mac book from a few years ago that white MacBook have that nice long hinge with that uh uh ventless design so it doesn't have any fans so it's a completely quiet experience and it's a really nice cheap laptop that gets the job done but of course you do have to work within the limits of the Chrome operating system and it gets better every day but certainly isn't for everybody you can't install certain games you can't install certain apps you do really have to be able to work within the limits of a web browser so that's something to keep in mind but otherwise if you're in the market for a Chromebook I see no reason not to take a look at the HP Chromebook so that's going to do for me guys in this video thanks for watching and I'll see you again in the next onehey guys Mike here the Detroit Borg with the HP Chromebook 11 this is the new 11-in Chromebook from HP there's also an HP4 but this is the cheapest one and probably going to be the biggest volume seller Chromebook but again this is kind of a compact lightweight inexpensive laptop powered by the Chrome OS you can see the packaging here is quite nice made with Google so this was designed with Google so HP has partnered with Google on this product so obviously this is the product that Google wants to highlight all right so let's just move these end pieces and we can take a look at this rather nice packaging they've done here so you can see it's kind of a paper product but it looks like it's a plastic shell really nicely done uh you have a little wrapper here to peel off so let's go ahead and do that right on the back you can see a new type of computer again referring to Chrome OS and there we go Google branding right on the packaging all right so I'm just going to lift this tab here and that removes the plastic and you can see we have these tabs right here to cut so let's go ahead and do that all right so let's go ahead and lift this lid pops off and there we go there is our HP Chromebook you see on the inside cover Chrome and there it is in its sort of cradle here with this little plastic handle to pull up to free it from its packaging so there you go it actually reminds me a lot of the plastic MacBook uh the regular MacBook that was discontinued last year looks very sharp now on the inside we find pretty basic LC here so hi there let's get started all you have to do is turn on your Chromebook pick your wireless network and sign in with your Google account or create one on the back we have some of the apps that are available with Chrome OS so we have the web browser obviously this is a computer powered by the Chrome web browser we create a new documents so you can author documents on this you also have video chatting music you have Google Drive for offline storage uh we also have uh instruction manuals built into the OS and we have an app store for the Chrome OS now inside we'll find our wall charger and something very interesting here is the fact that this is powered and charged by micro USB so you can charge your laptop with micro USB so you can see our power adapter here can peel this open to reveal it so there we have it we have the power adapter and kind of this matte black finish now we also have this quick start guide just tells you a little bit about setting up your Chromebook for the first time how to charge it what the buttons do that sort of thing and we're going to explore some of that here all right so let's go ahead and unpack our HP Chromebooks we have this little sleeve here that peels off the envelope should slide right off or it's going to be stuck to the rubber on the inside here so let's go ahead and break this open all right slides right out all right so let's go and take a look at the design and as you can see to me it looks a lot like a plastic MacBook it's got that same sort of rounded Edge to it uh both on the lid as well as the bottom here you can see the front has more of a taper toward the front there is no thumb nail port to lift up the lid so it kind of feels a little hard to get in there to open up the lid not too bad along the back you'll find that Chrome Strip This is a design feature that we saw with the pixel now in this case it's just backl it's back lit by the backlight of the display so it doesn't have its own LED Row in here like you got with the Chromebook Pixel along the side you'll find your two USB 2.0 ports no USB 3.0 ports in this case like you got with the Samsung Chromebook you also have your headphone jack your micro USB charging port along with an LED indicator up there Amber for charging green for fully charged you also see your hinge here which again looks a lot like a Macbook uh so it's almost the full width of the back you can see we have that space here for operating the hinge there are no vents or fans in this design so it's a pretty quiet laptop uh along the bottom you'll see the foot so the this is the rubber foot and as you can see it's color keyed or color matched to the uh sort of accent color that's also around the keyboard which I'll show you uh now these are Google colors so we have blue green yellow as well as red you also have the black version so you can get an all black model if you prefer something like that down here you can see made with Google with HP branding now if you look along the bottom you'll find there are no screws here so it's a pretty seamless design but this back panel can come off uh but it's not really meant to be pulled off by the user this is a magnesium chassis behind this plastic so there is a metal chassis behind this plastic which supports all the components inside all right so let's go ahead and lift our lid here we should find a piece of paper protecting the keyboard from the screen so so we'll remove that here looks like it's tucked into the hinge there we go now on the inside we'll find our blue accent color framing the keyboard now the speakers are behind the keyboard so you don't see any grills or vents or anything like that we find our multi-touch trackpad here you see that the uh surface the Palm rest surface is a smooth glossy plastic now taking a look at our display you can see it's framed in this sort of matte plastic and that really was the first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that we have this sort of low grade plastic surrounding this glossy display the display is actually very similar to the one on the MacBook Air this is an IPS display good off access viewing has a resolution of 1366 X 768 again it's the same uh Dimensions 11.6 in it's kind of a wide screen we have our VGA camera up here so not 720p just VGA we have an ambient light sensor as well as our microphone we have our Chrome branding down below you can see that looks pretty nice now if you look really closely at the hinge again it resembles a Macbook in many ways you can see a full width hinge here along with our bezel around the side uh so if you close it up you can see it's pretty tight you don't see any uh grills down here so like the MacBook Air which requires a fan uh you don't see any grills uh sort of exposed when you open up the hinge it's pretty uh tight all right so it looks like it's shipped to me with a battery completely discharged so I'm going to go ahead and connect my power supply so you can see I get a little amber light indicating that it's charging so let's go ahead and see if we can Boot It Up all right so I'm going to hit the power button now the great thing about a Chromebook is the fact that it boots up really quickly it's using flash storage again 16 gigs of flash storage has 2 gigs of RAM this is running a uh cortex a15 dual core processor clocked at 1.7 GHz again that's very similar I think it's actually identical to the outgoing Samsung Chromebook all right so let's go ahead and set this up I can select my language my keyboard and I can select a network so let's go ahead to my time capsule here now Chrome updates will automatically be installed when you set up your laptop for the first time all right so the next thing it wants me to do is choose a picture and I can see that the picture from my Google+ profile is already here but I can go ahead and take a picture right now if I prefer but I'm just going to go with that one click okay all right so if you're new to the Chromebook here is your chance to explore it now you get this tutorial page full of guys so for example how to add apps there is an app store here how to work offline so you can work offline all those is this is still pretty dependent on internet access so uh you can edit documents offline can read email offline but most things require online access because you're using a web browser uh you can also print from here so you can connect your printer and this explains how to do that we also have for example some keyboard and touchpad tips and tricks uh the keyboard uh tip and trick is pretty useful because for example there is no caps lock key here so if you're not familiar with Chromebooks in order to enable caps lock you hit the alt search buttons as you can see right here there's some other Tri uh tips here as well such as taking screenshots or taking partial screenshots because you don't have something like print screen and other Keys you're used to on Windows or Mac laptops all right so let's go and take a look at the basics of using your Chromebook so in the lower right corner you'll find uh your time your wireless status your battery as well as your account information if you click on that you get to more settings so you can see a quick view of your account so you could sign out and sign in as a new user which will transfer their account information to this computer you also have your wireless status so it takes you to your wireless uh so you can sign into a different account your blet bluetoth so you can enable Bluetooth and attach accessories like a Bluetooth keyboard you have your volume controls as well as your settings so if you want to go to your settings just hit that takes you to your full settings page and as you can see takes you to the web browser so again this is Chrome takes you to the Chrome browser and you can see it's a tab and everything and you can see all your bookmarks have synced across the top up here as well uh so all I had to do was log into my Google account and everything is here very simple now you can see all the options that are available to you including the users you can go to advanced settings to see more information here so you can see date and time you can select what time zone you're in looks like it's chosen the wrong time zone for me so let me go to Eastern Standard Time you also have your privacy settings Bluetooth passwords and forms uh your web content such as font size page zooms uh so I said it to 100% here which is default you can choose your language you can choose your download location so you can download files to this and change its location so you do have a file browser on this uh you have your U manage certifications for https Google Cloud Print so you can manage your cloud printing from here as well now on Startup I can also tell it what to do so for example I can have it open a new tab page I can have it continue where I last left off which is what I prefer or you can open a specific set of pages and you can go ahead and set those pages here I also have some accessibility options uh you have power wash which will remove all user accounts and reset your Chrome to a factory you also have reset browser settings so you can go ahead and reset that if you've changed all this and you want to go back to the default configuration now you can also manage your extensions here so again this is Chrome so you can install all of your extensions and yes I do have ad block you have a calculator you have the camera app some other things I've installed including chomecast so this does chomecast tabs to your chomecast on your TV as well now in our lower left corner we'll find our launcher right now I just have three apps or bookmarks if you really want to call these apps they're pretty much bookmarks because they open up inside the Chrome browser so you can see we can launch Chrome as you hover it over it you can see that they light up for you and tell you what they are uh so we can launch Chrome opens up a window now if we go ahead and launch Gmail it basically opens up in another tab so let me zoom out to show you this let's go ahead and launch Gmail there you go and we can also launch Maps as well if we go to our appid we can load more of our apps so we can launch YouTube and we can launch Google Drive and we can continue opening them all up uh now you can see up here we can close individual tabs as well now if you want to pin some of these items to your launch you can do that as well basically you use the right click gesture which is a two finger tap so for example if I want YouTube to appear on my launcher just right click and I can say pin to launcher there it is now it's in my launcher I also have other options here so for example I could have it as a pin tab I can open it up as a separate window or I can open up maximize so all of these are options which you can select and they stay fixed uh no matter where you are so for example if I select open eyes maximize every time I open up YouTube it will maximize the window so let me go ahead and close this tab for YouTube try opening up YouTube now there you go fills up the entire window if I don't want that behavior to happen all the time I can say open as a regular tab now something unique to the Chromebook experience is the way windows are managed so if you go up here you can see you can close your window or you can go up here to sort of either left justify your window right justify it or minimize it so if you go to minimize it it kind of takes it back to your dock if you go back to your dock you can maximize that window uh you can also just hit that box and it sort of minimi minimizes it enough so you can see your desktop here so you can basically get that standard Windows Experience now we do have an app store here so if we go to the App Store you can see apps optimized for the Chrome OS now you can see all of the apps available here and they're broken down into their respective categories so we have Google Drive and as you can see here if you look in the upper left corner you see that check mark that indicates I already have it installed uh so you can see other things I haven't installed including Outlook so there is an Outlook version for Chrome OS Spotify Sumo paint Kindle Cloud Reader you can see lots and lots of things here optimized for uh the Chrome OS so let's go ahead and install something here let's go ahead and use Gmail offline so there is an offline app for Gmail which I haven't tried yet so let's go ahead and install that so we're going to confirm that add and as you can see it's added to my app drawer so if I launch that here so basically this preloads all of my Gmail this means that I can be disconnected from my wireless network and still be able to click on all of my email to view it now if you have open tabs and you want to jump to them you just tap on one of your icons below here of course you do have to have them in your launcher and as you close them you can see that the light underneath the icon disappears so for example if I close the YouTube tab that goes out if I close the map tab that goes out and if I close the Gmail tab that also goes out now for the most part the Chromebook keyboard is pretty familiar so we have our volume controls up here including mute we have our power button up in the upper right corner we have our screen brightness controls up here now we have our Escape key here we have these navigation keys for for example going back backward or forward in our web history we also have this refresh button now we have two buttons here one is for maximizing your window and another one is for tabing between your open Windows now the trackpad is a pretty good size and we have that two finger gesture to scroll or that two finger gesture to right click on an item now we have a single click button here so we don't have a left-and or right hand click side it's just one single click here and it clicks more toward the bottom than the top now this Google themed light strip across the back this is becoming a Google Chrome trademark you'll see this on the Chrome pixel now with the Chrome pixel it's a dedicated light bar it actually has its own LEDs and it's able to change its own color do a whole light show and that sort of thing this is just back lit by the display and it's actually kind of hard to see unless you have the lights off once you turn the lights off you can see it so it's kind of dim here but it's kind of nice to have it now of course with Google we have Google doc so if you need a word processor or spreadsheet app that's built in of course that launches within the web browser so it's not a pre-installed app and you do need to have access to Internet in order for this to work now we have a host of media options from Google including Play Music as well as movies so if we go to Google Play movies we can launch that again it launches in a web browser not a dedicated app all right so we can go ahead and play back our video we can go to full screen mode now playback of video is really smooth with no frame dropping and the speakers are superb they're much better than I expected excellent stereo sound coming out of the speakers from the keyboard all right so let's go and take a look at the performance of the web browser now of course this is Chrome so it does have flash so you can use Flash on this laptop all right so I've loaded the version as you can see performance isn't the best here you don't see a lot of checkerboarding but you don't see really smooth performance but it really gets the job done and it's kind of similar to the Samsung Chromebook uh so for example we can click on one of these videos play back the video in the browser so as you can see that video playback is sort of slowing down performance let's go ahead and maximize this and see how it looks Purge oven I guess you want to call it so playm is pretty smooth here I don't see any frame dropping or performance issues in any way River because the rivers were the 11in Chromebook is actually similar in form factor to the 11-in MacBook Air they even have the same screen resolution uh but of course the MacBook Air is made out of aluminum has a much larger solid state hard drive has a 720p front-facing camera versus the VGA camera here has a full backlit keyboard with a glass trackpad this is all plastic of course and does not have back lighting uh neither computer our touchscreen of course uh and as you can see if you tilt the screen down uh this gives you an idea of the off access performance now you can see there's more glare here on the 11-in Chromebook versus the MacBook Air but the MacBook Air has worse off axis Hing because it's using a TN display instead of an IPS display so actually I think this display looks better it's not as bright as the MacBook Air so I have the screen at full brightness here uh same with the MacBook Air you can see that the MacBook Air is still a bit brighter now this keyboard actually feels pretty good if feels pretty rigid pretty solid but it does kind of bottom out a little harshly it doesn't really have a nice spring to it so when you're typing it doesn't really feel as high quality as again something like the Chromebook Pixel or the MacBook Air now there is one Achilles heel for the Chromebook 11in and that is battery life so we can expect about 5 hours of battery life out of this uh now something like the MacBook Air can get about 9 hours thanks to the Haswell processor so this definitely doesn't have the best battery life and for a lot of people that may not be good enough now the other limitation here is you only get 16 gigs of on board storage but when you purchase a Chromebook you do get for 2 years 100 gigs of Google storage so you can use cloud storage in lie of onboard storage now of course we do have two USB 2.0 ports here which means that you could use an external hard drive if you prefer now in terms of the quality of the construction it's definitely not a high-end laptop and for example you can kind of bend it so it kind of flexes and bends it's not a rigid laptop you can kind of feel that the hinge around the display is a little loose kind of creaks and that sort thing so it doesn't really feel like a quality laptop but again you're paying $279 but the display is beautiful I really like the display I'm actually surprised by how good it looks especially if you're used to a MacBook Air which is a high-end laptop but doesn't quite have the off AIS Vie or the Deep contrast level of this display it's not as bright but it's definitely a pretty good display of course it has that VJ camera which is pretty mediocre you kind of expect 720p this day and age uh the keyboard is not back lit which I didn't expect but it would be nice but I think a white uh keyboard makes it a little more visible that trackpad feels pretty nice it does feel a little stickier than something like the Chromebook Pixel or the glass trackpad on the MacBook Air but it does a pretty nice job and it's pretty responsive you can see this glossy finish along the side which doesn't feel great in your palm but it's not too bad uh and the design is really nice so for example when you close it up I really like the seamless design no screws or anything like that again it resembles the mac book from a few years ago that white MacBook have that nice long hinge with that uh uh ventless design so it doesn't have any fans so it's a completely quiet experience and it's a really nice cheap laptop that gets the job done but of course you do have to work within the limits of the Chrome operating system and it gets better every day but certainly isn't for everybody you can't install certain games you can't install certain apps you do really have to be able to work within the limits of a web browser so that's something to keep in mind but otherwise if you're in the market for a Chromebook I see no reason not to take a look at the HP Chromebook so that's going to do for me guys in this video thanks for watching and I'll see you again in the next one\n"