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Samsung Chromebook 2 13.3in. Review

Samsung Chromebook 2 13.3 inch review

 

Intro

I bought this for just School work as it doesn’t have all of the features notebooks with other operating systems have. Also all of my school work is done on my google drive account so this notebook makes it easy to have a completely integrated experience. This honestly works better for me than any other solution that I have tried. Lets delve into the review

 

Chrome OS

This is my first experience with the chrome OS. It is a very basic operating system that is highly optimized for the hardware that it possesses. Thanks to this it one  of the most snappy computers I have used even though it is probably one of the least powerful. Boot up is fast and is similar to windows as it gives you user options depending on whether you have multiple accounts logged in. For each google account you have logged in it is like a new user in windows. For the people that used the chrome browser your history add ons and passwords will all be synced. SO if you have Chrome save a password for any website it will change over. One of the cooler features that the Chromebook possesses is to edit your google docs offline and then it will automatically upload them to the drive. There is one problem with this and that is the fact that they are not contained in their original folder they are just downloaded docs. so if you are an organization freak than that will be a problem because your offline sync is just a bunch of docs with no folders. The offline usage is fine as it is still snappy saving your edits to your docs. Switching between accounts is seamless again as it is like switching users on any other operating system.

 

Screen

The screen is a 1080p TN pane. As far as tn panels go this one is bad, the viewing angles are atrocious vertical color shift is huge. Although since it is a notebook you can adjust the screen for the optimal viewing angles. Compared to my 13 inch retina macbook pro the viewing angles are utter crap, as the retina has no color shift on its vibrant ips panel while the chromebooks tn panel is worse than the one on the original razer blade.

 

 

Keyboard

The keyboard is a chiclet style keyboard with Chrome specific functions. These are the caps lock switched with a search key, there is a full screen button on f4 and a expose button on f5. One odd thing about it is that the brightness adjust keys are in the shape of gears. The actual keys are covered in a textured matte plastic this makes them feel good and have some grip when your hands are on them. Unluckily the instant you depress the key it feels mushy although it does have a semi tactile bump. The closest keyswitch that I could compare them to are a very mushy cherry mx browns. Although something odd I noticed was that I typed faster in this notebook than any other keyboard I have ever used before. The key spacing is perfect for my hand size which is long and this although it seems to be a good spacing for most people. This is interesting as it is  very small keyboard. Even compared to my macs keyboard  this keyboard crushes that one as far as typing speed goes.

 

Build quality

The build quality is better than that of most chromebooks that I have seen before it as it has flex but it is much better than you would think possible for a purely plastic notebook. The flex is mostly by torque and is very small. The four rubber feet on the bottom of the chromebook are very grippy and it is hard to slide the notebook around while they are touching the ground. When the screen is facing upwards it has a little bit of wobble if you are an aggressive typer like I am. The top of the notebook is made out of a fake pleather material which is similar to that on the galaxy note 3 if not exactly the same. Samsung must have a fetish for plastic leather as they have put it on all of their high end products. So overall the build quality of this notebook is great for the price.

 

Camera

The camera was probably one of the parts that samsung had to severely cut in their design. It is usable for conferencing and google hangouts but the image looks like the ISO is at 12,800 as their is a lot of grain.

 

Speakers

The speakers are horrible everything is muddled and the speakers are placed downwards exactly where your legs rest when you are using it on your lap so the noise output is severely reduced. This causes you to raise the volume to high and then when one of the speakers is exposed it blasts the music without the muffling so that can be a huge surprise.

 

Touchpad

The touchpad is very nice for the price of the notebook. The tracking is decent and it feels very nice. The clicking of the trackpad is awesome it is more tactile in my opinion than most mice microswitches. The right click is the two finger click like on most apple laptops. Personally I like this more than the left and right click buttons on the trackpad. This style gives it a very interesting look especially with the chrome accents on the outside.(no pun intended) there is an option that is automatically turned on which is tap to click which drove me crazy. There is an option for reverse scrolling which is called Australian scrolling, this is an option that I appreciated greatly as it made my life easier for reading articles and documents.

 

Wifi

The wireless connectivity is decent for the price and even includes bluetooth, although the range isn’t that far as it will show lower connectivity than other notebooks. For example at 1 bar it will still be pretty fast. Except at that same time it shows much lower connectivity than similar notebooks although those notebooks are at a much higher price. This is interesting as this a mainly online based notebook. Bluetooth is a nice inclusion if you don't want to use the two usb ports for a mouse.

 

Headphone test

Sound okay with my ie 80’s, the sound is more flatline with losing some sound on the bass and raising the high's making it a piercing sound.  Overall they sound worse than macbook pro and iphone but not a significant margin.

 

Comparison to Macbook pro retina

The Macbook pro is honestly less snappy and responsive than the chromebook, But of course you are using a full fledged Operating system on that notebook which obviously has more overhead than that of the highly optimized light chrome OS. Obviously there is much more you can do on the Macbook pro retina and it has more powerful hardware but for the things that the chromebook is focused on it does them better than the macbook pro. One of the huge parts of the Retina Macbook pro is its screen a 2560 by 1600 IPS screen with superb viewing angles this is where the Chromebook really falls behind as on the Retina macbook pro there is no color shift while on the chromebook there is huge color shift.

 

Processor

The processor on the samsung chromebook is an Octo-core samsung skew the same on that is used on the S5. Anandtech has a great article on this but I will summarize it. The samsung processor is really two different processors in one skew one a7 and one arm a15 both have 4 cores but the a7 is lower power and lower clocked. The a7 is the one that you would use if you are doing not that intensive things on your chromebook this is their version of Intel speedstep. The a15 cores are only used if you are doing something more intensive like having multiple apps open and browser tabs open. You can only use 4 of the cores at any time and they can only be from one of the processor packages as both can’t be used. This is plenty of processing power for chrome OS as 4 arm cores are plenty because of the extremely light footprint and overhead of the OS. Although there are some times that the Chromebook Stutters this is when more than 6 browser tabs are loading at once it will stutter for a second or two and then be fine.

 

Ram

This is one of the few Chromebooks with 4GB of RAM as most models have 2GB. THe 2 extra GB of ram help a lot while running multiple browser tabs as I tend to do. This lets it have 20 browser tabs open at the same time without stuttering unless they are all loading then you will have noticeable stutter.

 

Bootup

The bootup is about 8 to 9 seconds depending on how I left the Chromebook.

 

SSD

The Chromebook has a 16GB SSD. This makes opening apps super fast and adds to the silent footprint of the chromebook. You have about 10GB usable as the OS is also stored on that SSD. But if the 16GB ssd isn’t enough there is micro SD card expansion slot on the side.

 

Battery life

The battery life on this Chromebook is awesome I have been using it for about 7 hours and my battery is at 23%. This is with a relatively heavy load for this Chromebook. Its charging speed is fast, as once it is plugged in it takes an hour or two to charge from dead to full.

 

Side I/O

The side I/O is minimal, there is as follows on the left side there is the power cable receptor a usb 2.0 port a full sized HDMI port and a MIcro-SD card expansion slot. On he right there is a kensington lock a second usb 2.0 slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack. I don't find myself even using the usb ports as there aren't really any use for them in the Chrome OS. The hdmi is a nice inclusion if you were to do a board meeting or school with the Chromebook and needed to hook this up to a projector or an external display.

 

Weight and size

The chromebook is a very convenient size and lives up to the name notebook  as it can easily slide in my bag with all of my binders and papers. The weight and shape feels much less clunky vs. my macbook pro. I find myself grabbing this instead of the mac because of this and how much snappier and less clunky the OS is.

 

Glamor shots

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Conclusion

The samsung Chromebook 2 is great for the price. The build quality is decent and the Google  integration is awesome especially if your workplace or school uses Google services. It is a easy notebook to get used to if you are a frequent windows user while if you are a mac user it will be more difficult. Many of the multiwindow and tasking features are similar to windows. So if you are a heavy Google app user and are on a small budget than this would be a great option. As long as most of what you do is internet based. As for this Chromebook the octo-core exynos 5 processor and 4gb of ram are plenty for anything that you plan to on the notebook. The battery life is awesome the only thing that lets it down in my opinion is the screen but that is expected from a 340$ dollar notebook.

 

Amazon  http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Chromebook-13-Inch-Luminous-Titan/dp/B00J49ZH1U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411585568&sr=8-1&keywords=samsung+chromebook+2

 

Anandtech Article on the Processor

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7164/samsung-exynos-5-octa-5420-switches-back-to-arm-gpu

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so lets get this straight, you gotta rMBP and bought one of these? lel i cant judge i have a razer blade and went and got a macbook air :P HERPADERP... great review tho :D

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so lets get this straight, you gotta rMBP and bought one of these? lel i cant judge i have a razer blade and went and got a macbook air :P HERPADERP... great review tho :D

thanks and the chrome book is mainly for school and was given to me by the school

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so lets get this straight, you gotta rMBP and bought one of these? lel i cant judge i have a razer blade and went and got a macbook air :P HERPADERP... great review tho :D

which razer blade do you have

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which razer blade do you have

the 2014 model

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the 2014 model

so do you play at 3200 by 1800 or do you downscale

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so do you play at 3200 by 1800 or do you downscale

usually bring it down to 1080, no desire to play at such a high resolution at this point, leads to too much work on the gpu and too much heat output and its not worth it. when 4k is mainstream then ill be ready for it but as of now, the high res screen is only cool and all for web and productivity and 4k video :D

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usually bring it down to 1080, no desire to play at such a high resolution at this point, leads to too much work on the gpu and too much heat output and its not worth it. when 4k is mainstream then ill be ready for it but as of now, the high res screen is only cool and all for web and productivity and 4k video :D

:P  how does it perform at 1080p

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:P  how does it perform at 1080p

insanely well. its a dream to own.

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insanely well. its a dream to own.

nice what games you play

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nice what games you play

bf4, bioshock, lol, csgo, and cod4 :P its difficult to get me into new games :S whatever games i loved on my xbox when i didnt have a pc to game on are usually the games i stuck with.

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bf4, bioshock, lol, csgo, and cod4 :P its difficult to get me into new games :S whatever games i loved on my xbox when i didnt have a pc to game on are usually the games i stuck with.

yea one question lol on an xbone

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yea one question lol on an xbone

well not that and csgo obv :P my friends got me into those two. now the wait for gta v pc begins! even tho i beat it on xbox i wanna see what some people's reactions on here are considering some of them havent played before.

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well not that and csgo obv :P my friends got me into those two. now the wait for gta v pc begins! even tho i beat it on xbox i wanna see what some people's reactions on here are considering some of them havent played before.

yea i was wondering about that one too have you tried titanfall i know the campaighn and graphics arn't the best but it has a super fun dynamic especially running up and down walls and the titans

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well not that and csgo obv :P my friends got me into those two. now the wait for gta v pc begins! even tho i beat it on xbox i wanna see what some people's reactions on here are considering some of them havent played before.

gta v is a great game will get once its for pc but i just always got sidetrcked and just messed around with cheats can't wait for the carmeggedon to be on gta v :P

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yea i was wondering about that one too have you tried titanfall i know the campaighn and graphics arn't the best but it has a super fun dynamic especially running up and down walls and the titans

i really want that game it just seems so awesome :D

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                         The Austrailian king of LTT said that I'm awesome and a funny guy. the greatest psu list known to man DDR3 ram guide

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i really want that game it just seems so awesome :D

i would buy it on amazon if you have an origin account i got mine for 23 usd

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yea i was wondering about that one too have you tried titanfall i know the campaighn and graphics arn't the best but it has a super fun dynamic especially running up and down walls and the titans

i got bored of titanfall really fast :S

 

gta v is a great game will get once its for pc but i just always got sidetrcked and just messed around with cheats can't wait for the carmeggedon to be on gta v :P

gta v is gonna be better for me on pc than it was console :P im gonna have more people to talk to about it and play with :D

 

i really want that game it just seems so awesome :D

its not that great. gets really old really fast

 

i would buy it on amazon if you have an origin account i got mine for 23 usd

for a low price then i guess its worth it :P

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i got bored of titanfall really fast :S

 

gta v is gonna be better for me on pc than it was console :P im gonna have more people to talk to about it and play with :D

 

its not that great. gets really old really fast

 

for a low price then i guess its worth it :P

yea amazon has good game deals

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i would buy it on amazon if you have an origin account i got mine for 23 usd

i  will get it when i can

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                         The Austrailian king of LTT said that I'm awesome and a funny guy. the greatest psu list known to man DDR3 ram guide

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i got bored of titanfall really fast :S

 

gta v is gonna be better for me on pc than it was console :P im gonna have more people to talk to about it and play with :D

 

its not that great. gets really old really fast

 

for a low price then i guess its worth it :P

well i won't know if i like or hate it until i get it because there have been many games that i got that i thought i would like because it seem like it was amazing on yt videos

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My system is the Dell Inspiron 15 5559 Microsoft Signature Edition

                         The Austrailian king of LTT said that I'm awesome and a funny guy. the greatest psu list known to man DDR3 ram guide

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well i won't know if i like or hate it until i get it because there have been many games that i got that i thought i would like because it seem like it was amazing on yt videos

good point

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good point

yea

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Great review, I was thinking of buying this Chromebook when it came out but the poor quality display was a deal breaker for me. 

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