Google Announces Chromebook 11 made by HP

Google's finally brought a new Chromebook offering to the market with HP's Chromebook 11 and this Chromebook sports a variety of color options. Unlike past Chromebooks that came in just one color option, you can get this newest version in white with either red, blue, green, or yellow accents. For those wanting a more rugged look the Chromebook also comes in glossy black too.

All of the Chromebooks feature a band of colors (blue, red, yellow, and green) on the top of the display which lights when the lid is opened. The Chromebook 11 also features a magnesium frame that is bonded its plastic shell, which in turn is supposed to give the device a more solid feel and better build quality.

The Chromebook 11 has a weak point when it comes to its I/O ports as it comes with 2 USB ports, a headphone/microphone jack, and a micro-USB charging port. I'm disappointed that HP and Google didn't include an SD card slot as this would have made it easier to add storage to the unit. Another thing that I would have liked to see in this newest Chromebook is Bluetooth which is MIA. It should be noted one of the USB ports can use an HDMI to USB adapter to display video as well.

The Chromebook comes with a micro-USB charger the same charger that most Android phones use.

The reason Google decided it didn't need an HDMI port on this new device is that they probably wanted to leverage its $35 Chromecast, their wireless HDMI streaming device. The Chromecast allows users to stream content from their Chrome browsers directly onto your living room TV or HDMI monitor.

Google and HP decided to give the Chromebook 11 an 11.6" 1366x768 IPS display with 300 nits of brightness. I'm not a fan of the old 1366x768 resolution, but its $279 so I can't really complain about this since the devices price is super low.

Now for the internals of the Chromebook 11 and what you should expect from them. Google's newest Chromebook features a Samsung Exynos 5250 dual-core ARM processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 16GB SSD. The speakers are located internally too tucked underneath the Chromebook 11's keyboard.

The processor in this device is the same one used in Samsung's Nexus 10 so it's not the newest ARM processor on the market. Laptop Mag did a few tests on the device and it seems it should be slightly faster than Samsung's Series 3 Chromebook that uses a Exynos 5 ARM processor and slightly slower than Intel based Chromebooks.

This newest Chromebook looks promising as the major problem with Samsung's Series 3 Chromebook was that it featured a flimsy design and feel. HP and Google have done their best to make a solid product with an upgraded internals and a fancy IPS screen.