Samsung’s 303C12 Chromebook may not be full laptop replacement, but it’s cheaper than many tablets (Image credit: Samsung)
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to play with a Toshiba Satellite U925t, one of the new breed of Windows 8 convertible Ultrabooks. This time around, I was able to spend some quality time with a new Google Chromebook, a Samsung 303C12. This was my first time spending more than a few minutes dabbling at a store display with a Chromebook (I’ve had it for a few weeks now). Given the growing popularity of these devices as a low-cost replacement for a tablet or netbook, I thought it might be worth writing about.
First things first, as a Mac guy, the naming conventions in the other camps drive me a little crazy. When Apple releases the 11.6-inch MacBook Air, it’s reasonably easy to visualize based on the name. What the hell is a Toshiba Satellite U925t or a Samsung 303C12? Am I supposed to figure out something from those model number designations? That quibble aside, on to my actual experience.
First of all, it’s pretty obvious who Samsung was gunning for when they designed this Chromebook. The silver finish, black chiclet keys, track pad and form factor are remarkably similar to the aforementioned 11.6-inch MacBook Air. There’s nothing wrong with that — Apple sells a boatload of these ultraportables — but the resemblance is purely superficial. Instead of aluminum, the Samsung’s casing is silver painted plastic. The keys don’t have quite the same responsiveness and lack backlighting. The Chromebook’s hinge mechanism is much less smooth and it’s top-heavy, so trying to open it single handedly means the whole thing can easily flip over if you aren’t careful. The display doesn’t have the same brightness. When it comes to performance, there’s no comparison (this Chromebook has 2GB of RAM, a 16 GB SSD and is powered by a Samsung Exynos 5 dual-core processor designed for mobile use). But…
The Chromebook — or at least this Chromebook (Google’s latest may be a different story) isn’t intended to compete against the MacBook Air. That it superficially looks like one is a marketing tactic. At less than a third the cost of a base model MacBook Air’s $999 price tag, this Chromebook is aimed squarely at people looking for a second computing device to have around the house. In other words, the tablet crowd (and the former netbook crowd). And for that purpose, the Samsung Chromebook does a pretty decent job.
At a price that’s competitive against most tablets, all of a sudden it looks like a better proposition. It has an 11.6-inch LED display at 1366 x 768 resolution. Perfectly fine for watching streaming movies or YouTube videos. It runs Google’s Chrome operating system and is completely tied into Google’s online services, meaning that you don’t have to pay for a bunch of software to make it useful. Core services like Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides have links built in to ChromeOS, so you sign in with your Google account and have full access to productivity software and the ability to save files in a variety of formats (including Microsoft Office compatible versions). Although the Chromebook is intended to be used while connected, you can work offline.
How did I find the whole Chromebook experience? Compared to OSX and Windows, Google’s ChromeOS takes some getting used to. While there is a dock, pretty much your entire navigational experience is browser based. You can quickly end up with dozens of tabs running in your browser, including ones that aren’t content, but instead settings. It can be disorienting at first while you adjust to this way of doing things. It’s also often much slower than a traditional PC experience as well, as tabs and pages sometimes took a while to fully load. Offline capability is limited, but it is possible to do some basic tasks including writing or editing documents (assuming you have a copy of the document saved locally).
The gaming experience wasn’t exactly spectacular. For anyone used to downloading a game app on a tablet, the Chromebook experience was much clunkier. Some games played fine (For Flash games that blast advertising all over your screen), but too many times I ended up running into situations where I’d have music and direction keys displayed on an otherwise blank screen, or notices that “This game is not supported on your current system” along with a recommendation that I download Google’s Chrome browser (which the Chromebook is already running). These sorts of snafus shouldn’t happen when you’re accessing games from Google’s own Chrome webstore.
Thanks to the combination ChromeOS and SSD, the Samsung Chromebook boots up quickly, in the 10 second timeframe. It’s easy on the battery (I was getting the claimed six hours), there’s also no fan since the CPU is designed for mobile use and generates much less heat than a traditional PC CPU. The only time my boot up was longer than the 10 second range was a 30 second launch when Chrome detected a security update (it does this automatically) and installed it as part of the boot process.
When all is said and done, if you’re looking for a laptop replacement, this Samsung Chromebook isn’t it. It may look like a MacBook Air from a distance, but it’s an entirely different beast. However, if you’re looking for an inexpensive second computer — something the kids can use for homework, web surfing or light duty online gaming — this would be a pretty good choice. It’s not quite as portable as a tablet, but at only 2.5 pounds and with six hours of battery life, it sure beats a tablet (even one with a Bluetooth keyboard) for banging out e-mail and light text editing.
Wired: A very cheap option for a second computer (or a computer for your kids to use) or as a tablet/keyboard combo alternative, lightweight, decent display, attractive design, automatically applies critical security updates, decent battery life.
Tired: Without a Wi-Fi connection it’s at a distinct disadvantage, the ChromeOS user experience isn’t as polished as it could be, web-connected functionality meant frequent slowdowns and waits for pages to refresh or load, opening the lid is a pain.
