VERDICT
The Samsung Chromebook Pro skews a little too heavily towards being an Android tablet. Regardless, it’s a solid hybrid that brings us one step closer to the perfect marriage between Chrome OS and Android.
PROS:
- Stunning, vivid screen,Stylus support on Chrome OS,Gorgeous, simple design
CONS:
- Cramped keyboard,9 hours max battery life ,Weak speakers
Over the years, we’ve seen Chrome OS and Android steadily merge, and now the union has culminated with the introduction of the Samsung Chromebook Pro .
Part Chromebook and part Android tablet, the 12.3-inch Chromebook Pro combines a familiar 360-degree convertible laptop design with a 3:2 screen suited for slates. What’s more, the Pro also debuts stylus support on a Chrome OS device for the first time ever.
However, in an attempt to serve as both an Android tablet and traditional Chromebook, it skews itself a little too far towards the former. This results in a cramped keyboard and battery life that can’t outlast other Chrome OS devices.
Price and availability
Our review configuration comes priced at $549 (about £440, AU$720), which is a smidgen more expensive than the $499 or £599 (about AU$650) Asus Chromebook C302 that just earned our Editor’s Choice award. However, that extra 50 bucks nets you a sharper QHD 2,400 x 1,600 display, plus the built-in stylus, but half as much storage as inside the Asus Chromebook.
The HP Chromebook 13 is by far the most premium and thinnest Chrome OS device we’ve ever reviewed, but it’s the most expensive at $599 or £729 (about AU$800). With an 3,200 x 1,800 QHD+ display, it has the sharpest screen in this pack, but it lacks touch support that has become standard on Chrome OS machines.
For those that don’t need the all the processing power of an Intel Core m3 processor, the OB1 ARM chip-powered Samsung Chromebook Plus is also available for $449 (about £360, AU$590). Despite being a lower-tier model, the Plus retains its QHD display and other specs. Again, the Asus Chromebook 302 is its closest competitor, meeting it at the same $449 or £499 (about AU$590) price with an Pentium processor and 32GB of storage.
For now it appears the Samsung Chromebook Pro has only been announced in the US, but we can't imagine that it won't be be coming to UK and Australia in the near future.
Design
It’s clear Samsung’s design for the Chromebook Pro centers around portability.
Weighing in at a scant 2.38 pounds (1.08kg), this all-metal Chromebook is the lightest device in its class and a featherweight compared to most laptops we’ve ever used. While it’s lighter than the HP Chromebook 13, it can’t win the thinnest award with an 0.55-inch high frame that’s just five-hundredths of an inch thicker.
Despite the extra fractions of an inch, the Chromebook Pro is one incredibly thin and light device that feels like it’s almost filled with air. But don’t mistake its lightweight nature for a flimsy laptop.
The all-aluminum build of this Chromebook makes it sturdy and flex free. Samsung also went with all rounded edges and a softer metal that feels much more inviting to hold for long stretches than most hybrid notebooks.
One key difference of our pre-production review unit, is the retail-ready model’s exterior should actually be jet black. We love the look of our silver unit and it only looks even more “pro”-fessional (if you will) with a darker paint job.
Don't be a square
Unlike many of Samsung’s other laptops, the Pro features a 3:2 display that you would more regularly see on tablets. You get more vertical pixels that makes it easier to view photos in fullscreen and read web pages at a glance, especially while holding it in a portrait orientation.
Unfortunately, this squarer aspect ratio doesn’t jive with wide-screen video in 16:9 and 21:9 aspect ratios. TV shows and movies letterbox heavily, leaving you with thick black bars above and below the picture.
One other unfortunate side effect of the boxy proportions it it ends up making for a cramped keyboard. Without the wide form-factor of a 16:9 screen, the keyboard has almost no room to stretch out, resulting in smaller overall keys, snipped shift keys, and – worst of all – a delete key that’s one-fourth of its normal size.
It’s an uncomfortable typing environment, but one you can get used to after several days with the Chromebook. Still, during those first few days with the device, we had to backspace many accidental characters when we meant to hit that very backspace key.
Key travel is disappointingly thin at about one millimeter at best, but they at least offer a bit of resistance and spring back up immediately. With a device as thin as this, though, we couldn’t ask for much more key travel than this.
Unfortunately, this is also the only premium Chromebook that lacks keyboard backlighting.
The trackpad is as serviceable as they come, with a plastic feel and accurate tracking. Without the numerous multi-touch gestures seen on macOS Sierra andWindows 10 , you’ll only be moving around the cursor and clicking on things anyway.
A new class of Chromebook
Samsung calls the Chromebook Pro a new class of device designed with the Play Store in mind. To this end, it comes equipped with gyroscopes and accelerometers we used to great effect to drive through courses in Asphalt 8.
More importantly, though, this is the first Chromebook with a built-in stylus. As withSamsung’s Galaxy Note line, pulling out the stylus out of the side immediately gives you a few options to add a new note, take a screenshot or use the pen to direct an on-screen laser pointer during presentations.
For writing and sketching, the stylus feels on par with everything we’ve used on Microsoft’s Surface devices – which is to say it feels extremely natural and precise. Samsung fine-tuned the friction between the glass and pen to make it feel like writing on paper. The stylus is also pressure sensitive, so pressing it harder against the screen will change the shape of your strokes.
Chromebooks (and even our Pro model here) shouldn’t be as powerful as Windows slates to support digital pens as well as this. However, Google and Samsung developed software that reduces latency while using the stylus.
Using the power of the search company’s cloud and machine learning technology, the two companies analyzed thousands of handwriting and artistic strokes to predict where the pen will go.
All that predictive software comes baked into the Chromebook Pro, so don’t worry about Google logging your strokes or needing an Internet connection for a smooth writing or drawing experience.
What’s more, you can save everything you pen to Google Keep, which then can scan your handwriting to create a searchable index. It’s an incredibly useful tool, and we’re more impressed it can actually make whole words out of our illegible chicken scratch.
The Samsung Chromebook Pro is capable of a lot, including streaming 4K media, thanks to its Intel Core m3-6Y30 processor and 4GB of onboard memory. That would normally be overkill for most Chromebooks, but Samsung’s latest Chrome OS machine puts all that power to good use for driving a QHD screen and running more demanding Android apps.
We had no problems tabbing through dozens of websites at a time, periodically popping open Android apps and playing Google Music all at once.
Although the Samsung Chromebook Pro comes outfitted with the same Intel Core m3 processor as the Asus Chromebook Flip C302 , it lagged behind in our benchmarks. For example, it took nearly 600 more milliseconds to complete Mozilla’s web-based Kraken test. This could possibly be due to the Chromebook Pro’s sharper screen putting more pressure on processing power.
Otherwise, the HP Chromebook 13 is still one of the fastest Chrome OS machines we’ve ever reviewed, thanks to its Intel Core m5 CPU – though it comes at a higher cost.
Battery life
The higher-resolution screen, of course, also makes an impact on battery life. Sure, running our standard battery test for nearly nine hours straight and putting in seven and a half hours of work will be fine for most – but there are longer lasting Chromebooks out there.
The Asus Chromebook Flip C302 ran for two hours longer playing the same movie test, while giving us 30 minutes more of regular usage than the Samsung hybrid. Still, things could be worse: the HP Chromebook 13 managed to stay on for just eight hours on our standard battery test, thanks to its ludicrous, 3,200 x 1,800-resolution display.
Popping display
No matter what type of media you consume on this Chromebook, it’ll all look amazing on this screen. Samsung has stuck to its tradition of including gorgeous displays on its devices, and here we have a 12.3-inch, QHD (2,400 x 1,600) resolution display.
The Samsung Chromebook Pro has the best display we've seen on a Chromebook yet.
On top of sharpness, the display renders colors with vivid richness without being overly saturated. Contrast here is also better represented than we’ve seen on the Asus Chromebook Flip C302 and other Chrome OS devices, but we still see black levels fall off at the darkest end of the scale.
The Samsung Chromebook Pro doesn’t have the world’s loudest speakers, and they can sound hollow at higher volumes, too. They’re serviceable enough for jamming to as you surf the web and for watching the odd movie, but headphones are a must if you want a pleasurable listening experience.
Better as a tablet
Fold back the display and the Samsung Chromebook Pro feels as natural as using any Android tablet. The 3:2 screen gives it the familiar shape of a slate that’s great for reading content from articles saved to our Instapaper and e-comics we bought on the Kindle store to regular web browsing on Chrome.
With Android apps at our fingertips, we also used Netflix and YouTube to download offline videos for our long commute.
Chromebooks were once useless without an Internet connection, but now, thanks with the ability to sync offline drive files, save media through apps and download games, we don’t have to rely on a connection all the time.
That said, storage capacity on Chromebooks hasn’t increased with the times. The usual 16 to 32GB isn’t going to cut it for much longer, and until manufacturers wise up, we’ll have to rely on adding microSD cards assuming the slot is available.
Like the Asus Chromebook Flip, our pre-production review sample of the Pro came running with a beta version of Chrome OS, granting us access to the Play Store. However, Google tells us the retail Samsung Chromebook Pro will arrive this April with a stable release of software and full access to the Play Store.
Whether it’s running on beta software or not, Android apps run almost perfectly on this Chromebook. There’s still the occasional hitch, such as the Kindle app not displaying books in full-screen while in portrait mode, and many apps like Slack not scaling text properly. We can only hope this will improve in the future.
We liked
Samsung has hit a home run with the first stylus-supported Chromebook. Right out of the gate, the pen feels as natural as writing on paper, a feat that took three generations of Surface devices for Microsoft to master.
Aside from the unique built-in pen, this is one the lightest, well-built Chromebooks yet, with a high-res screen designed for consuming web media. Combined with a wonderful tablet mode, we’ll just skip Android tablets entirely and just get this Chrome OS machine.
We disliked
The Samsung Chromebook Pro doesn’t perfectly ride the line between being an Android tablet and and Chromebook. In its focus to offer a great tablet experience, it’s an imperfect laptop with an annoyingly small keyboard and shorter battery life than we’ve become accustomed to on Chrome OS.
Final verdict
Aside from the $549 (about £440, AU$720) premium you’ll pay for this Chrome OS hybrid, the biggest deciding factor of whether you’ll buy this device is what type of Chromebook are you looking for.
If you’re looking for a Chromebook designed for the Android-fused future Google is pushing, the Samsung Chromebook Pro is what you seek. The Asus Chromebook Flip C302 hews closer to the traditional Chromebook format, with a great keyboard and longer battery life, while still being able to flip into a tablet.
Alternatively, if you seek an simple, affordable Chromebook of yore, then your options expand greatly with any budget option from Acer, HP and the usual suspects.
This editor in particular sees the Samsung Chromebook Pro as the device he's been waiting for. It’s the perfect Chrome OS device for being used as an Android tablet for 70 to 90% of the time and flipping back into a traditional laptop for writing emails and the odd article. If your use case is the same, your wait for a competent Android-tablet-Chromebook-hybrid is finally over.
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