Asus Chromebook C423
It doesn’t top the performance charts, butbu this premium option offersoff great value for money
PRICE £317 (£380 inc VAT) from uk.store.asus.com
While the low-cost Chromebooks get all the sales and the premium models grab all the attention, it’s often the mid-range Chromebooks that deliver the best value for money. Take the Asus Chromebook C423: it looks and feels like a premium laptop, yet costs less than £400.
You don’t have to look too hard to see how this is done. The design is impressively slim and light at 16mm thick and 1.34kg, but what looks like an aluminium shell turns out to be a plastic body with an aluminiumfinished lid. The processor is the 2017vintage Pentium N4200, although it’s teamed with 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 64GB of storage.
The Full HD “IPS-level” screen on our model isn’t bad at all. Viewing angles and colour accuracy aren’t what you’d get from a high-end IPS panel, while we measured brightness at just 221cd/m2. With sRGB coverage of 61% you’re not getting high-end image quality. Yet, subjectively, it’s perfectly usable and – as long as you’re not in sunlight – videos and Stadia games look great. It also punches above its weight on the audio front, with plenty of volume and a hint of bass.
Asus provides the same basic connections on each side of the unit: one USB-A 3 and one USB-C 3, with an audio port and a microSD card
slot on the left-hand side. You can charge it through either of the USB-C ports, and Asus provides one of its usual lightweight cuboid chargers. For wireless connectivity you’re looking at an 802.11ac 2x2 MIMO setup; hardly cutting edge but more than adequate.
The keyboard is hit and miss. It has a good, well-spaced layout and the large, flat keys have a textured finish that makes it easier to touch type. However, while there’s plenty of travel, the feel is slightly loose and spongy. We have no complaints about the touchpad or the glossy touchscreen, even if the latter isn’t as useful in a clamshell design.
In fact, there are only two areas where the Asus feels low-end: performance and battery life. Unlike other Chromebooks, the Asus couldn’t quite pass the ten-hour mark in our video playback test, while we didn’t see as much improvement over the 4GB Celeron Chromebooks as we expected, probably because while the Pentium has more cores, these run at a slower maximum clock. In real-world use, though, the Asus can feel surprisingly snappy, even with eight open Chrome tabs.