Colourful gadgets are mostly a ploy, I'm told. Best Buy shoppers may be drawn in by a purple camera or a shimmering orange laptop, but they leave the store with something in black. I've heard the same thing from a number of manufacturers across plenty of product categories. And looking around my apartment, I'm as guilty as anyone.
But the HP Chromebook 14 doesn't come in black, so I was left with no choice but to buy the gadget that first caught my eye — a big, gaudy, matte pink notebook. It’s the biggest, loudest Chromebook yet, and at $299 it’s a remarkably affordable device for what it offers: a big 14-inch screen, a brand-new Intel processor, and all the ports and options you might not expect from a Chromebook.
Chrome OS is having a moment. Manufacturers around the world are starting to make Chromebooks, and many have promised to bring them out of the bargain basement. A Chromebook could soon become a truly viable notebook, and not just a living room companion or your family’s fourth laptop. On paper, the HP Chromebook 14 is the best attempt yet — not to mention the most colourful.
HP’s tiny Chromebook 11 feels like a toy — it’s thin, light, and cheap, and it’s almost surprising that there’s a working laptop inside. The larger Chromebook 14, on the other hand, feels like a computer. It’s made of grippy, rubbery plastic that is comfortable in my hands and on my lap but feels like something of a wholly different class than the sleek, metallic MacBook Air or Acer Aspire S7 — but then, it is of a wholly different class.
HP’s tiny Chromebook 11 feels like a toy — it’s thin, light, and cheap, and it’s almost surprising that there’s a working laptop inside. The larger Chromebook 14, on the other hand, feels like a computer. It’s made of grippy, rubbery plastic that is comfortable in my hands and on my lap but feels like something of a wholly different class than the sleek, metallic MacBook Air or Acer Aspire S7 — but then, it is of a wholly different class.
At 4.08 pounds and 0.81 inches thick, there’s nothing particularly portable about the Chromebook 14. $299 rarely buys much in the way of fit and finish, and with seams and ridges everywhere you look there’s nothing particularly high-end about it either. But it’s solid and sturdy, having already survived one drop off the edge of my coffee table and plenty of trips in my bag. It feels well-made and carefully assembled, which in some ways matters even more than the raw materials.
Chromebooks exist in an awkward performance bracket. They’re typically used for less-intensive activity — "it’s just a web browser," or so goes the common refrain — and as such don’t really need high-end processors. But high-end processors would enable more powerful activities, and particularly with Intel’s latest Haswell chips there’s a huge boost in battery life and efficiency too. The Chromebook 14’s Celeron 2955U chip (the same as in the Acer C720) is for now a decent middle ground: it’s based on Haswell, but is designed explicitlycheaper, lower-end devices like this one.
At this point, Chrome OS is still a limited operating system, but it’s not raw functionality that’s the problem. There’s almost nothing you can’t do with the Chromebook 14, other than heavy-duty video editing and PC-class gaming. But for everything it offers, Chrome OS is still in places an awkward and unintuitive platform. If you have more than one window open, navigating between them is needlessly difficult: there’s no easy way to see all your windows at once, or even scroll through them in an obvious way. The local file manager is still too basic, and as soon as you have more than a few apps installed they become cumbersome to organize and find.
More than its spec sheet or feature list, that’s what holds Chrome OS back — there’s plenty here for both novices and power users, but the UI balks at anything beyond the basics. Chrome OS is great for email and web browsing, but even as HP seems to make the case for a Chromebook as a full-featured laptop, Google holds it back. There are signs of that changing, as Google works on a better notification system and a better platform for offline usage and native apps, but it’s not there yet.
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