Each week, our friends at gdgt go through the latest gadgets and score them to help you decide which ones to buy. Here are some of their most recent picks. Want more? Visit gdgt anytime to catch up on the latest, and subscribe to gdgt's newsletter to get a weekly roundup in your inbox.
Things have been pretty quiet on the Chromebook front since the launch of Google's gorgeous, but pricey flagship, the Pixel. It's arguably a hard product to beat, but then again, the Chromebook battle is really taking place at the low end of the market with machines like Acer's inexpensive $199 C7 and Samsung's delightful $249 ARM-based model. This is exactly the arena HP's decided to enter with its $329 Pavilion 14, the first Chromebook with a 14-inch display. Apparently, the company's research indicates there's room for a larger Chromebook that's used primarily at home where thickness, weight and battery life are less critical. While that's difficult for road warriors like us to understand, it only takes a visit to Best Buy to see row upon row of large, cheap, generic Windows laptops, so perhaps HP is onto something. Like Acer's C7, the Pavilion 14 is a Chromebook based on an existing PC chassis. It features an Intel Celeron processor, 2GB RAM, a 16GB SSD and Bluetooth. So how does it compare to the aforementioned competition? Is there a market for a larger Chromebook that mostly lives at home? Read on to find out.
Google raised the bar considerably for Chrome OS computers with the Chromebook Pixel -- but just how badly does it bruise other mainstream Chromebooks in the ring? We won't lie: for the most part, it's an outright thrashing. While it doesn't have as big a screen as HP's Pavilion 14 Chromebook or last as long on battery as Samsung's ARM-based Chromebook, the Pixel is technically superior in most every other way. That 2,560 x 1,700 display resolution, 1.8GHz Core i5 and support for LTE put Google's PC in a different class altogether, and that's when excluding freebies like the 1TB of Google Drive storage. It's even slimmer than some of its peers. The one clear obstacle is the price -- at $1,299, you're paying six times more than you would for an Acer C7 that manages a bigger (if much slower) hard drive. As you'll see in the chart, though, being part of the premium club has its perks.
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Remember last week when HP leaked a 14-inch Chromebook on its own site? That was a big surprise, to say the least -- the company has never put out a Chrome OS system before, and we weren't aware this was even that popular a category. Well, HP just officially announced the Pavilion 14 Chromebook, and pretty much the only surprise is the availability date: we had heard it would go on sale February 17th, but it's actually available today for $330.
Suffice to say, that's more than what you'll pay for Samsung's Chromebook ($249) or Acer's C7 ($199). For the money, it offers similar specs as the Acer C7, but the design appears considerably more polished. Meanwhile, with a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 CPU and 2GB of RAM, it should perform a bit better than the Samsung model, which has a nice design, but chugs along on a lower-powered ARM processor. Like most other Chromebooks, this one has 16GB of built-in flash storage, along with a 1,366 x 768 display. Users also get 100GB of Google Drive space (free for the first two years).
All told, this 14-inch system weighs about four pounds, making it not only the biggest Chromebook on the market, but the heaviest. At least that 0.8-inch chassis makes room for a good selection of ports: HDMI output, three USB 2.0 sockets and an SD reader. It even has an Ethernet jack, something that Samsung's removed from its latest Chrome OS device. Unfortunately, though, a bigger footprint doesn't mean a bigger battery: the Pavilion 14 Chromebook is rated for four hours and 15 minutes of runtime, putting it behind Samsung's model. So, are a sleek design and stronger performance worth the premium? We'll tackle that in our eventual review, but if you buy today you'll just have to make that call yourself. Check the PR after the break or Google's Chrome Blog (linked below) more info.
