Asus Chromebook C233
A lovable Chromebook in terms of its design, but woefully slow when youyo want it to do anything
PRICE £166 (£199 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk
The Asus Chromebook C2 C223 makes a fine first impression for a cut-price Chromebook, especially in the natty red finish of our review model. It’s roughly the size of an A4 pad of paper and very slim at just 17.3mm, while the weight is precisely 1kg. The all-plastic construction feels cheap, while the lid is thin and a little too flexible for comfort, but the actual build feels very solid even if our review unit had developed the odd scuff during its lifetime as a test machine.
The screen isn’t too bad, either. Sure, at a maximum 203cd/m2 it’s nowhere near bright enough for use outdoors in strong sunlight, and it can only manage a miserable 57% of the sRGB colour gamut, but it produces a crisper image with a little more colour depth than, for instance, the Acer Chromebook 311, and YouTube videos and Stadia games look better than they have any right to on a device this cheap. Wh What’s t’ more, they also sound bet better: the output from the downwa downward-firing speakers near the front is surprisingly big, if a little lacking in finesse.
It’s when it comes to usability that things start to go awry. The touchpad is fine. It’s over 10cm wide, with a smooth plastic finish, and is very responsive esponsive to swipes and taps. The keyboard, however, has plenty of travel but a very light and slightly inconsistent nconsistent action that sometimes makes akes it hard to work out if it’s registered gistered a keystroke.
Still, Asus wins some points back for connectivity thanks to two USB-C 3 ports, orts, with display output and Power wer Delivery, as well as a single
USB-A B-A 3.1 port and a microSD card slot. . What’s more, the C223’s battery life lasted for two hours longer than Asus’s us’s stated ten hours.
This isn’t a bad Chromebook for the money – until, that is, you get to the performance. It’s based on the ancient dual-core Celeron N3350, which is a dual-core Apollo Lake processor that debuted in 2016, and the age is showing. You won’t have any problems with a couple of tabs open running simple web-based applications, li ti b but t keep opening new tabs and nd you’ll eventually run into o waits and pauses, even with ith 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM fitted. ed. As you’ll ll see in our benchmark results on p92, the Asus Chromebook book C223 made its way y to the bottom of the table in every single test, making it just too slow w to recommend.