Last week, a leaked product listing suggested that HP was preparing to unveil its first Chromebook, and today Google made it official: the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook is a 14-inch Chrome OS-equipped laptop that is available today and starts at $329.99. Its 14-inch screen should be a boon to users whose eyes are strained by the 11- and 12-inch screens of other recent Chromebooks, though the resolution remains an unfortunately low 1366×768. HP's pricing is also higher than those smaller systems—Acer's C7 Chromebook costs just $199, while Samsung's ARM-based model costs $249.
The Pavilion 14 Chromebook's specs are in line with what we've come to expect from the machines lately: it has a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 16GB SSD inside, while three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, a 100 megabit LAN port, a card reader, and a headphone jack round out the port selection. Dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0 take care of wireless communications, and a webcam is also included. The 3.96 pound laptop is rated for 4.25 hours of battery life, in the same ballpark as Acer's C7 but short of the six-or-seven hours you can expect from the Samsung model.
Like Acer's C7, HP's Chromebook is a lightly modified version of one of its low-end Windows laptops, the HP Pavilion Sleekbook 14-b010us. That laptop includes a Windows license and several upgraded components, but the body and build quality of both should be more or less identical. Despite this similarity, don't expect to be able to buy the Chromebook version and put your own Windows license on it—while a version of Ubuntu has been made that is compatible with Chromebooks' locked-down bootloaders, installing alternate operating systems on the computers is a non-trivial undertaking.
Like Google's other recent Chromebook launches, the Pavilion 14 Chromebook includes 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years, helping to make up for its small 16GB of internal storage.
reader comments
22