Samsung’s latest Chromebook – the Series 3 XE303C12-A01US – is small, slim, and speedy. This little laptop weighs less than 2.5 pounds and packs a decent performance punch, assuming you’re comparing it to the right machines.
A laptop-shaped improvement to a tablet or smartphone
The Samsung Series 3 looks like a laptop, but it's not. It's equipped with a mobile processor and very little internal storage, and it runs the browser-based Chrome operating system instead of the Apple Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows platform. It performs more like a tablet or advanced smartphone than an ultraportable. If you’re looking to do much more than surf the web and create cloud-based content (via Google or another service), then this is not the laptop for you. But if you’re looking for a tablet with much better content-creation functionality--namely, an integrated keyboard--then the Samsung Chromebook is an appealing option.
Our review model, which costs $249.99 as configured, sports a 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos 5 dual-core ARM processor, which is the same mobile system-on-a-chip found in theGoogle Nexus 10 tablet. Like the Nexus 10, the Chromebook pairs the Exynos 5 with 2GB of memory and 16GB of hard drive space.
The Chromebook also sports built-in Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, two USB ports (one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0), a 3-in-1 card reader, and a headphone/microphone combination port. There’s also an HDMI-out port on the back of the machine. Samsung offers USB dongles for VGA-out and Ethernet (sold separately).
No comments:
Post a Comment