HP Chromebook 15
A big-screen beauty, but HP needs to offer more if it wants to outclass Lenovo’s Yoga rival
SCORE ★★★☆☆ PRICE £333 (£399 inc VAT) from store.hp.com/uk
HP’s Chromebooks tend to fall into two camps. In one, you get smart, innovative, class-leading laptops like the muchloved Chromebook 13 G1 and hybrid Chromebook X2. In the other, HP offers cost-conscious models that don’t score so well on design or performance but deliver on value. HP’s latest model, the Chromebook 15, falls between the two.
It’s nicely designed: our model came in a fetching two-tone ink-blue and white finish, with a tough anodised aluminium chassis and what HP calls a ceramic-feel plastic lid. It’s just 18mm thick when closed and weighs only 1.8kg. Its standout feature, though, is the (non-touch)
15.6in IPS screen. Thanks to the tiny side bezels, it looks huge, and while you’ll find higher-end Chromebooks with more pixels per inch, the 1,920 x 1080 resolution is more than sharp enough at this screen size.
HP hasn’t fluffed the ergonomics, either. You get a full-sized keyboard complete with a numeric pad, and it’s fine in use, with large, flat-topped keys, a sensible layout with goodsized Shift and Ctrl keys, and a usable cursor set. The page navigation keys and Delete key are also handy when editing long documents. What’s more,
the touchpad is a whopper at 12cm wide, if only 6.4cm deep, and has a responsive, smooth surface.
Connectivity is standard for a modern Chromebook, with one USB-C port and one USB-A 3.1 on either side, along with 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2.
It’s not all good news, though. In our tests, the screen only covered 63.3% of the SRGB gamut, while brightness topped out at 237cd/m 237cd/m2. Put it too near a window and there’s not enough brightness and contrast to make it visible. Don’t expect too much from the sound, either. Despite HP’s usual B&O branding, it’s brash, muddled and congested, getting worse as you push the volume higher.
In terms of battery life, the HP bowed out after 6hrs 21mins of video playback, just behind the 15.6in Lenovo Yoga. However, where the Lenovo has the excuse of a full-bore Core i5 CPU, the HP has a lightweight Pentium 4415U, with two cores running four threads at a base speed of 2.3GHz. It’s a mid-range processor and performance matches, with the HP coming in above the Celeronbased competition but below those with Intel Core CPUs. Higher-spec versions of the Chromebook 15 are on their way, and at £399 it’s still good value, but we prefer the Yoga C630.