Google Pixelbook Go
It’s short on grunt, but th is Chromebook is lightweigh ht, long-lived and likeable
SCORE
PRICE £691 (£829 inc VAT) from store.google.com
IT managers love the security andd manageability of Chrome OS, while CFOs love the fact that a perfectly serviceable Chromebook can be had for as little as £200. If you want the full Google-branded experience, however, you’ll have to pay a bit more – £691 exc VAT, to be precise, for the Pixelbook Go.
As the name suggests, the focus is on portability. The Go is just 13mm thick, and weighs a fairly airy 1.08kg. There’s no need to carry a separate charger around, either: in our video-rundown test, the Go ran for a magnificent 13hrs 19mins before finally shutting down.
As is usual with Chromebooks, however, these plus points come at the expense of computing power. The Pixelbook Go is built on an ultrallighhtweighht dduall-core Intell Core i5-8200Y processor, partnered with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of slow eMMC storage. The result is a chasm in performance between the Pixelbook and this month’s Windows-based alternatives: our desktop benchmarks don’t run on Chrome OS, but the cross-platform Geekbench 5 and GFXBench tell the story clearly enough ( see the graphs overleaf ).
The defence, of course, is that Chrome OS isn’t really designed for demanding tasks. That’s true as far as it goes, but when you’re working on a big table in Google Sheets you may well long for the snappiness of Excel running on a full-fat Core i7. It’s also disappointing to note that the Pixelbook Go is stuck with 802.11ac wireless: for a computer that’s desiggned to do everything in the cloudd, a Wi-Fi 6 adapter would have madee a lot of sense.
Sttill, if you don’t ask too much of it, the PPixelbook Go is user-friendly. The keys are nicely spaced out, the touchhpad well sized and responsive; the 13.3in touchscreen looks lovely and bbold too, with an outstanding cont rrast ratio of 2,197:1 and a maxiimum brightness of 355cd/m 2 thhat will do for any indoor eenvironment. While an average DDelta E of 2.05 is undistinguished in this company, that still indicates excellent accuracy. It’s not the sharpest panel here, as Google opts for Full HD resolution, but for typical Chromebook tasks it does the job.
In short, the key to the Pixelbook Go is to keep your expectations at the right level. Yes, it costs quite a bit more than the average Chromebook, and it would have been nice if Google had crammed in a little more CPU power. But as both a solid and simple connected companion, you will find the Pixelbook Go’s lightweight design and stunning battery life very easy to get along with.