Chromebook Review After A Week
Chromebooks are around for a while now. I recently gave a shot and bought a small one ASUS C214 MA. I actually exchanged my old (~7 years) Toshiba Satellite E laptop with Intel i5 which was running Windows 10 (It was Win 8 when I bought). The laptop was not only slow (Right from the time I bought it) but also stared to show hardware problems like speaker and keyboard issues. I saw a n exchange price of around 8K INR in amazon and decided to get rid of it before it becomes not even worth exchanging. We (including my 5y/o for online classes post pandemic) used it mostly by installing Ubuntu (dual boot) which was significantly faster. I have no idea why Microsoft Windows cant figure out how make the startup fast and remove unnecessary process eating up memory and CPU. Nevertheless enough ranting about old laptop lets come to the chromebook.
The reason I did not buy another such windows laptop again because I didn’t want a mediocre one again under 30K INR. I am already used to a very high end Macbook Pro at work so every other cheap laptop would have been a bad experience. I wanted to test my hypothesis that everything these days can be achieved in cloud. Programming can be done in remotely in Github spaces, Excel/Spreadsheet can be done in Google Sheets (in fact people prefer that over offline installation). Photo editing, anyway I don’t use photostat but wanted to give some tool try like the ones build into google photos. FOr Chromebooks the configuration I have for ASUS C314, which is 4GB RAM, 64GB SSD and Intel Celeron processor is kind of standard, as ChromeOS takes a little space and memory and most of the work is one online using the power of cloud. Here are some points after using for a little over a week.
General Chromebook Review
- Boots instantly, literally in seconds, so no more waiting for minutes while an important meeting has already begin.
- Pretty much all Android Apps can be run in chromebook via Play store. Some of them of course does not run i.e. Clubhouse does crash as soon as you enter a room, but apps like Snap seed (arguably best editing app in mobile), Hotstar runs like a charm.
- PWA apps like Youtube, Zoom etc are first class citizen. They launch super fast.
- Chrome is the de-facto browser so you may not get a similar experience in any other browser like Firefox. I personally use firefox in iPhone and Mac but in chromebook it gave me a mobile experience though Chrome experience was great like a desktop.
- There is a Linux Shell in chromebook which was quite useful for playing around the command like tools.
- Capturing screen image and video is supper easy with one button without any external app.
- Could Install VPN like 1.1.1.1/Wrap.
- Could easily connect to camera and download/upload photos.
About ASUS C214.
- Its touch screen. Its the smallest Chromebook but it flips around to give a tablet like experience. One can accidentally touch the keys in the keyboard on the back but never interfered much.
- Some of the apps switches to tablet mode when the screen is flipped or half folded to watch videos.
- I could side load APK files (i.e. JioTV). Not recommended as it can harm your laptop and privacy.
- Keyboard feels bit small as its a small laptop but I spend most of the time consuming the content rather than producing.
- It has only 1 USB port but there are 2 USB-C ports which can be used as charing as well. Mac charger worked as wel.(Not recommended as it delivers more power in watts which may be harmful)
- SD Card slot can enhance storage if 64GB is less for some use cases.
Programming
- I could install VS code after enabling Linux and worked well.
Scope of improvement
- Apps like Hot star sometimes freezes at higher resolution when played in browser but netflix never had a problem while playing high resolution content in browser.
- Speaker could have been louder. With a running ceiling fan its hard to understand anything.