Samsung Chromebook 2
A Chromebook that is thin and attractive as well as affordable? What magick is this?
When Samsung announced its second Chromebook, it made our heads turn. Rather than following the flock of Chromebooks with cheap plastic bodies, Samsung opted to give its new cloud-based laptop a leatherette finish on its lid, plus a 1080p display for the 13-inch model. Unfortunately, Samsung saddled the laptop with its Exynos ARM processor, designed for tablets, and it chugged when asked to multitask.
Five months later, Samsung has given the smaller 11.6-inch Chromebook 2 a refresh, swapping the mobile processor for an Intel Celeron CPU. Let’s see if this quick fix has turned the Samsung Chromebook 2 into the winner it was meant to be.
The Chromebook 2 looks to be even better engineered than many mid-range laptops. The back of the laptop lid is wrapped with a leather-like finish that reminiscent of the Samsung Galaxy S5’s design, down to the faux stitching.
The rest of the laptop's body is made of a light grey plastic, but does not flex even when you're mashing away at the keyboard. This is largely due to the laptop's metal internal frame, which extends across the entire body. Each of the corners is also reinforced with metal, which adds an extra bit of protection in case the laptop falls.
You're also looking at one of the thinnest Chromebooks yet, measuring in at 290x204x17mm. Most 12-inch Chromebooks hover around 1.3kg, but the Samsung Chromebook 2 wins over most, coming in at 1.2kg.
These specifications should look familiar if you're comparing it with other Chrome OS-based options, like the Dell Chromebook 11 and Acer C720. The Samsung comes with a very similar 11.6-inch and 1,366x768-pixel screen, 16GB SSD and 2GB of RAM. Despite these similarities, the new 2.58GHz Intel Celeron N2840 processor is the show-stopper. Not only does it replace the Exynos chip, it's also Intel's fanless Bay Trail design.
Most other Chromebooks, including the Acer and Dell, have used the 1.4GHz Celeron 2955U processor from Intel's Haswell family. The Bay Trail chip runs a bit cooler without any bothersome fan whine, but it also sacrifices some performance, making it the slower chip.
Still some lag
We also experienced some noticeable lag in Chrome. Oddly enough this stuttering occurred when trying to type a website or search query into the address bar. The Intel chip also sometimes chugged as it scrolled through a Google Drive document, especially with any documents containing tables or graphs. Otherwise, the Chromebook 2 had no trouble loading up 25 browser tabs while listening to tunes over Google Music. The Bay Trail chip also had no lag issues when playing 1080p video on YouTube.
Another fault of Chromebooks is that they all almost universally have terribly washed-out displays, save for a few outliers like the Chromebook Pixel. The Chromebook 2 manages to buck this trend as well – but not entirely – with a bright display that manages to be good but not great. Colours are
never truly vibrant, especially considering Samsung's penchant for oversaturated AMOLED panels, but they are accurate. What's more, you can actually see blacks as they were meant to be seen rather than gray blotches.
In our tests, the battery lasted for 7 hours and 32 minutes: very good, although still not quite enough to beat the Acer C720 with its absurd 8 hours and 30 minutes of run time.
Overall, the new Samsung Chromebook 2 is an improvement on the original. Though there are still performance niggles, it’s definitely ahead of the curve.