at a glance
Celery: Fine for even heavy browsing; truly stupendous battery life.
Rutabaga: Lackluster graphics performance; should be cheaper.
Insane battery life, pedestrian performance
It may surprise you to know, but we absolutely love writing about Chromebooks. Sure, none of us would trade our daily drivers in for one, but the category is vastly more interesting than a lot of others.
That’s because most laptops get boring really fast. Once a new CPU is out, all of the older CPU models are flushed and there’s very little difference between them. With Chromebooks, it’s a smorgasbord of architectures. The new Samsung Chromebook 2 here, for example, packs a dual-core “Bay Trail” 2.18GHz Celeron N2840, which turbo boosts to 2.58GHz.
One thing we want to point out before it confuses the hell out of you is that this new Bay Trail–based Chromebook 2 is not to be mixed up with the eight-core Exynos 5–based Chromebook, which also happens to be named Chromebook 2. And yes, there are Celeron-based Chromebooks that use Haswell Celerons being sold alongside Chromebooks using Bay Trail–based Celeron Chromebooks, too. Got it? We don’t.
Since we were curious as to how well the Bay Trail Celeron would do, we compared it to our old standby, an Acer C720 Chromebook using the Haswell-based 1.4GHz Celeron 2955U, and also the HP Chromebook 11, which uses a dual-core 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos 5250 ARM processor. The upshot: the new Bay Trail Celeron is capable, but it ain’t no Haswell. It easily outperformed the HP Chromebook 11 but the results were close enough that we suspect a hotter ARM chip, such as Nvidia’s Tegra K1, might give it a good run. To be fair to this little Celeron, it’s fine for normal loads—we were able to load 20 web pages and scroll without the hellacious lag that ARM-based Chromebooks have given us in the past.
That’s a real issue, too. Older ARM-based Chromebooks are not recommended unless you want to slow down your life. Even if the benchmarks didn’t put it that far behind the Samsung, the ARM chip actually felt slow. The HP couldn’t even run the OortOnline.GL graphics benchmark, nor Tanki Online. On that front, the Samsung Chromebook 2 could push out a sub-optimal 11fps in Tanki Online. The Acer C720 brought us to a playable 30fps, while a Haswell Core i3–based C720 hit 60fps.
The Chromebook 2’s 11.6-inch TN panel is meh in off-axis, and colors are muted. Despite this, it’s actually a technically better panel than the IPS in the HP Chromebook 11 in white saturation, black level, and compression banding. The average Joe will still pick the HP’s IPS panel as being “better” side-by-side, though.
The keyboard on the Samsung is OK and has a standard 19mm pitch width. The speakers were passable but were tinnier than the Acer C720 and not as loud. We also did some write testing to the unit’s 16GB eMMC storage by copying a 3.7GB video to it via USB 3.0. Performance was not as pathetic as the HP Chromebook 11, but we do wish for a bit more heft, especially when Acer’s C720 series of Chromebooks offer better performance at a better price.
The battery life is nothing to scoff at, though. Sure, it’s maybe half the performance of the Haswell Celeron, but it’s also half its wattage, too, at 7.5 watts for the Bay Trail Celeron chip. The Acer C720, which we consider pretty good at more than five hours of constant use, was eclipsed by the Samsung, which took us up beyond seven hours. Considering that’s a constant repeating of an HTML5 benchmark, we’re pretty sure normal googling and email will give you a full day’s use.
In the end, what we have is a middle-of-the-pack Chromebook in features, on the lower end of the scale in performance, but stupendous battery life. On the street, the Chromebook 2 is $250. The older Acer C720 we compared it to with its 4GB of RAM would set you back $320. However, you can get that same C720 with half the RAM for $199. If we had to pick performance over battery life, the C720 is the go-to Chromebook, but there is something to be said about just (barely) good enough performance with insane battery life, too.
$250, www.samsung.com
| Specifications | |
| Dimensions (H x D x W) | 0.7 x 8 x 11.4 inches |
| Display | 11.6-inches, 1366x768 TN |
| Connectivity | HDMI, 1x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, 1x Micro SD, Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11 ac |
| Processor | Intel Celeron N2840 |
| Benchmarks | |||
| Samsung Chromebook 2 |
HP Chromebook 11 | Acer C720-2800 | |
| CPU | 2.18GHz-2.58GHz Celeron N2840 | 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos 5250 | 1.4GHz Celeron 2955U |
| RAM | 2GB DDR3L/1600 | 2GB DDR3L/1066 | 4GB DDR3 |
| SunSpider 1.02 (ms) | 607.7 | 756.6 | 358.3 |
| Google Octane V2 | 7,579 | 6,203 | 11,638 |
| Peacekeeper | 1,659 | 1,174 | 3,062 |
| Wirple |
449 | 337 | 1,368 |
| Kraken 1.1 | 3,897.6 | 5,211.0 | 2,500.4 |
| OortOnline.Gl | 1,380 | WNR | 3,258 |
| File Copy Across USB 3.0 | 122 | 255 | 87 |
| Battery Run Down (min) | 434 | 230 | 309 |
| Weight (lb) | 2.65 | 2.30 | 2.76 |
Best scores are bolded. All three Chromebooks were tested using the latest ChromeOS update 38.0.2125.110.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1d2CLQz
