My only major complaint is about power. It’s not unreasonable to be demanding a full eight hours’ use from a laptop today, and even if long battery life was never explicitly part of the promise of the Chromebook concept, it nevertheless feels wrong that we using a lightweight alternative OS on a chip architecture famed for power-efficiency, and yet not getting stellar battery life.
The Micro USB charging is a nice touch(even though, grumble grumble, Micro-USB is a fiddle to connect) but however technically understandable it is, it’s frustrating that when connected through essentially anything except the supplied charger, the Chromebook 11’s battery actually runs down unless it’s asleep or off.
What’s more, the fact that we can’t do anything other than slow the battery drain when daisy-chaining power through the SlimPort adapter if we’ve got it hooked up to an external display essentially precludes it from being a machine we regularly use as a main’desktop’ PC. The trackpad is occasionally a little jittery, and we’ve seen trackpads with its finish before now get shiny, worn patches through heavy use that makes them less responsive. We don’t know if this would be the case here, but it’s a concern.
The plastic case picks up fingerprints very easily, and those colour accents on the bottom, which look like they’re going to be grippy, aren’t; a missed opportunity to gently stop the laptop moving around on a table.
Finally, as always seems to be the case, details about the model that has 4G LTE built in are proving difficult to confirm, something that, despite the abilities of Chrome OS and some web apps to work offline, is a particular pain in a machine ostensibly designed with’accessing the internet’ as its sole task.