HP Chromebook 11 Unboxing and First Thoughts

When I saw that HP where releasing a new Chromebook I knew I was going to buy it. There’s a couple of reasons for this: Firstly I’ve wanted a little laptop for a while as it would be easier to take into University than my sizeable 15” Macbook Pro, then there’s the fact that I fell in love with ChromeOS whilst I was an Intern at Google, and finally, it looked pretty! I suppose the fact that I only paid £209 for it is also a benefit!

I’m going to give a brief overview of the specs just to give you an idea what we’re working with. The first thing to note here is that this is not a powerful laptop and neither is it meant to be, it uses the 1.7 GHz Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC has 2GB of RAM, a 16GB SSD and an 11.6” screen.

So Here we go!

It arrived in a big brown box!

And it looks like they used the world’s strongest tape here. Waiter’s friend to the rescue!

Once I had managed to get into that box I found another box. Just from looking at it I thought this was made out of Polystyrene (Styrofoam) but it’s actually made out of some kind of card.

The attention to detail is pretty nice!

And here it is!

But we’re going to put that to one side for now and see what else is in the box.

All the box contained was a little welcome card, the charger and a quick start manual (3 or 4 pages) which of course I ignored.

A quick look at the charger. Obviously this is the UK adapter, it provides 3 amps to the Chromebook to charge it via Micro-USB. It feels strange powering a laptop with Micro-USB, but it’s also kind of cool!

Right, back to the laptop, the first thing I noticed when taking it out of the box was just how light it was. It’s the lightest of the Chromebooks on the market weighing in at 1 kg, yet it gets away with this without feeling cheap.

After removing the plastic wrapping we can admire it in it’s shiny glory. :P First a view of the back, with the big rubber pads. I expected there to be more HP branding but it seems that the logo you can see on the bottom is the only one on the device.

A quick look at the ports on the device before we crack it open. From the left we have: The Micro-USB charging and Slimport video port, two USB 2.0 ports and a combo Microphone/Headphone port.

Now to crack it open!

A close-up here looking over the keyboard. When opening it up I felt that it was actually better looking than I expected it to be. I gave the keyboard a good bashing and it felt really nice to use. (I’m typing this on it right now!)

Time to connect the power and turn her on. Handy little charging light on the side, standard thing, orange while charging, green when full. Interestingly, when I tried the 2 Amp charger that came with my Nexus 7 I discovered that it actually lost charge with heavy usage.

And finally a view of the device on! It’s hard to show the screen quality here, but I was very pleasantly surprised at the resolution (1,366 x 768) and how bright the colours look.

Within the next couple of weeks I may post a long-term review to go through what I feel about the laptop after using it for a while. Until then, bye!

P.S. If you want more information or want to buy one, head here: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/chrome/devices/hp-chromebook-11/