Samsung is bringing a new Chromebook to market next month. Coming in 11-inch and 13-inch form factors the new Samsung Chromebook 2 offers updated hardware and more than eight hours of battery life.
The Chromebook 2 will be available in 11.6” and 13.3” models. The smaller variant will come in white or black while the larger SKU is only available in gray. The lids use a soft touch plastic that resembles stitched leather like that found on some Samsung smartphones. The 11.6” is 0.66-inches thick and weighs 2.43 pounds. The 13.3” model is 0.65-inches thick and weighs 3.09 pounds. The 11.6” Chromebook 2 has a 1366×768 display while the 13.3” Chromebook uses a 1920 x 1080 resolution display.
Internally, the Chromebook 2 is powered by an unspecified Exynos 5 Octa SoC at either 1.9GHz (11.6”) or 2.1GHz (13.3”), 4GB of DDR3L memory, and 16GB internal SSD storage. Internal radios include 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. Samsung rates the battery life at 8 hours for the 11.6” Chromebook and 8.5 hours for the 13.3” Chromebook.
Beyond the wireless tech, I/O includes one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0 port, one HDMI, one headphone output, and one micro SD card slot. This port configuration is available on both Chromebook 2 sizes.
Samsung is launching its Chromebook 2 in April at $319.99 and $399.99 for the 11.6” and 13.3” respectively. This new Chromebook is coming to a competitive market that is increasingly packed with Bay Trail-powered Windows 8.1 notebooks (and tablets) that are getting cheaper and Android tablets that are getting more features and more powerful thanks to new ARM-based SoCs. I'm interested to see what platform users start gravitating towards, is the cloud-connected Chrome OS good enough when paired with good battery life and a physical keyboard?
Are you looking forward to Samsung's new Chromebook 2?
Looking forward to the next
Looking forward to the next iteration of Atom devices that run Windows actually.
An Atom / Celeron iteration
An Atom / Celeron iteration with support for Windows, so you can dual boot would make this perfect for my commuting computer.
I currently use either a 2C4T or 1C2T Atom with 2Gb and W7, works great. But a nicer screen would help, a lot. Also an integrated video encoder for Netflix…
An Atom / Celeron iteration
An Atom / Celeron iteration with support for Windows, so you can dual boot would make this perfect for my commuting computer.
I currently use either a 2C4T or 1C2T Atom with 2Gb and W7, works great. But a nicer screen would help, a lot. Also an integrated video encoder for Netflix…
I had the previous Samsung
I had the previous Samsung Chromebook and NFL.com always detected the laptop as a mobile device and gave the mobile site. There was nothing I could do about it as I tried everything I could find. Found out later that it was just an issue. I tried contacting NFL to raise the issue but never got anywhere. The old processor was so slow too that I sold it and got a Acer C720 and it has been a way better experience. Also, the Acer C720 has a full sized shift key on the left side whereas the Samsung didn’t I absolutely hate laptops that have a half sized shift key on the left side.
At $320 the 11 inch model is
At $320 the 11 inch model is going to have a hard time competing with the acer C720 at $200 unless samsung has gone with a nice ips display I can’t see any reason not to go with the c720. Yeah you only have 2gb of ram vs 4 with the samsung but you also have an intel haswell based processor instead of ARM so its easy to run a more powerful os like ubuntu on it and it has great battery life.