The new HP Chromebook 11 screen is really good for such an inexpensive machine. In fact, the color reproduction and viewing angles rival the 11″ MacBook Air based on my experience.
It’s not that slow. I haven’t really tried to push it’s limits yet, but I have The Verge, music playing from Pandora, YouTube, Gmail, CNN and Business Insider open and there are no hiccups or the janky scrolling that horrified Joshua on the Vergecast the other week. I just played a 720p clip on Youtube and it played very smoothly. In fact, the same Gravity trailer David used for his review video. 1080p did skip a frame or two, but there’s no point in playing that kind of video on this machine anyway, so what’s the point?
The touchpad is not so great. It may be both hardware and software, but using the touchpad here isn’t very pleasing. It has too much friction and it tends to drag on your finger, so the cursor goes dotting around the screen sometimes. It’s not that bad, and after about 30 minutes I got used to it for the most part. I guess every new touchpad/mouse has a slight learning curve, but this one was particularly jarring for this first few minutes. It’s one of those “did they try it first?!” things with PC manufacturers that always perplexes me, but in this case Google had the final say, you’d think they would have done something about it.
Another gripe: the moment I turned it on it downloaded a 20 minute upgrade that was “critical” and I suppose had to be downloaded right then. It may have been an update to fix some bugs that the earlier models had, so no real complaint there, just kind of annoying.
Written by verger1
Had mine for a couple of days now, and I’m happy with it. It’s the best design I’ve experienced on a low-end computer, and the keyboard and screen are great.
I’ve been able to get a good amount of work done on it without any hiccups. Video isn’t flawless, but it’s good enough.
I was worried after the negative review but, after using it, I just don’t have the same problems.
Written by whitemale
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