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Hands-on with the surprisingly nice $279 HP Chromebook 11

You actually get pretty decent build quality for the price.

Google's Caesar Sengupta introduces HP's Chromebook 11.
Google's Caesar Sengupta introduces HP's Chromebook 11.
Andrew Cunningham

Until now, Chromebook buyers have had to make a choice. You could get either a cheap laptop with cheap components or the premium-but-ridiculously-expensive Chromebook Pixel. When Google says that HP's new $279 Chromebook 11 is "inspired" by the Pixel, it's not about components—the Chromebook 11 lacks the high-resolution touchscreen, the high-end Ivy Bridge CPU, and the solid aluminum construction—the Pixel's banner features. Rather, it's about making a laptop that makes enthusiasts happy without the Pixel's sticker shock.

That begins with the screen. It's an 11.6-inch 1366×768 non-touch affair (that's a non-remarkable resolution, though in a laptop this size it's more reasonable than it is in a 13-inch-or-larger system), but the most significant thing about it is that it's an IPS panel instead of the low-quality TN panel that has come with every cheap Chromebook to date. Nothing tanks an otherwise good laptop like a bad display, and the low contrast ratio and shallow viewing angles of the screens in the Samsung Chromebook or Acer's C7 Chromebook made those computers more difficult to recommend despite their low prices.

The panel in the Chromebook 11, on the other hand, is glossy with nice colors and deep blacks—not AMOLED deep, but great for the money. If you've ever wondered to yourself why a $199 tablet can offer a higher-quality display than a $600 laptop, the Chromebook 11 was made specifically for you.

The general build quality also falls short of the Pixel, but it's likewise a nice upgrade from the all-plastic frames of previous low-cost Chromebooks. The glossy white plastic is reminiscent of nothing so much as the old white polycarbonate MacBooks, which likewise used a glossy plastic case reinforced by a metal frame. Google's Caesar Sengupta, who introduced the Chromebook 11 this morning, noted that the device had no visible screws and was completely fanless, which contributes to the laptop's clean design.

The Chromebook 11 definitely weighs less than those older MacBooks, but the overall quality is similar—the laptop is light (at 2.3 pounds) and the body doesn't bend or flex, but you'll probably have problems with hairline scratches since the units that were floating around Google's demo area had already sustained some (we noticed the same kind of thing happening to the glossy plastic body of the iPhone 5C). The lid of the laptop does bend slightly under pressure and it wobbles a bit as you adjust it, but not when you're typing on the keyboard.

The white version of the Chromebook 11 also comes in one of four standard Google accent colors—green, blue, yellow, and red. You can see these accents around the keyboard and also on the bottom of the laptop. On the bottom, the accented bits are slightly rubberized and serve the same function as the little rubber feet on the bottoms of most laptops. The bottom is also adorned with HP and "made with Google" logos—the only branding elsewhere on the laptop is the light bar on the lid (just a coloredful backlit strip, and not the programmable LED bar from the Pixel) and the Chrome logo in the display bezel.

The keyboard uses essentially the same layout as that of the Pixel, which means full-sized keys in a straightforward layout. Like other Chromebooks, it lacks the equivalent of the Command or Windows key that you'd find on Mac or PC keyboards, in favor of double-width Ctrl and Alt keys on the left. The Caps Lock key continues to be supplanted by a Search key, but you can re-map it to Caps Lock in the settings if you need to yell on the Internet more often than you need to search for things. The trackpad in this Chromebook is reasonably accurate and responsive, though we'll have to type on the system for a bit more time before we can say for sure how it handles things like palm rejection.

The laptop keeps all of its ports on its left edge, and there aren't many of them: just two USB 2.0 ports, a headphone jack, and a micro-USB port for both charging and for video output via the same SlimPort standard used in some of the more recent Nexus devices. The previous-generation Samsung and Acer Chromebooks included a more varied port selection as well as SD card slots, so the Chromebook 11 is a slight step down in this regard even though you should be able to replace the lost functionality with the appropriate dongles.

Finally, browsing in Chrome and opening the various apps installed on the laptop is reasonably snappy, if noticeably slower than Chrome running on the 2013 MacBook Air I use day-to-day. The dual-core Exynos 5 SoC in the Chromebook 11 is the same one that came in last year's Samsung Chromebook (though the clock speeds may differ—Google didn't go into specifics on this front), so general performance is fine but the raw horsepower available is less than what is available in Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell Chromebooks (though you should still see a nice increase if you're coming from one of the older Atom Chromebooks). Google rates the device's battery life at about six hours, south of the eight-to-ten hours it's promising for the latest crop of Haswell Chromebooks. The other hardware specs—2GB of DDR3 RAM, 16GB of solid-state storage, dual-band 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0, a built-in webcam—are nothing game-changing, but they're respectable for the price.

We liked the Samsung Chromebook and Acer's C7 Chromebook last year because they finally brought the devices' prices down to a price point appropriate for their functionality. The idea of a Web-only laptop isn't a bad one, but it's more convincing at $200 or $250 than the $450 starting price of some older Intel-based Chromebooks. HP's Chromebook 11, at least at first glance, addresses many of the problems that come with laptops in that price range. It won't convince you that ChromeOS is worthwhile if you already know that it won't do what you need, but it's an ideal successor to last year's low-cost Chromebooks.

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