Samsung Chromebook XE500C21 (H02UK) Specifications, Reviews and Shopping

Reviews

If you wish solely to consume online content then the beautiful design of the Samsung Chromebook arguably lets you do this with more grace than a tablet or netbook and it has superb battery life. For technophobes it also offers a get up and go solution that is unsurpassed in its simplicity.The problem is theory does not live up to reality. More portable devices like smartphones and tablets use a mix of offline and online functionality to create far more powerful and flexible solutions making Chrome feel unnecessarily limited. Meanwhile the RRP pushes it too close to budget laptop prices.
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The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is well-built and pleasingly portable, but Chrome OS feels more like an experiment than a finished, polished product. We reckon the price tag is also too steep for a no-frills laptop, especially when you can buy a decently performing netbook such as the Toshiba NB520 for about £70 to £120 less. Still, all experiments have to start somewhere, and it's almost certain that we'll all be increasingly living in the cloud as technology marches on. We may well soon find ourselves looking back fondly at the Series 5 and musing That's where it all began.
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It is very early days for both Chrome OS and the Chromebooks that run it. The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook gets enough of the basics right that we can see the potential of the new operating system. However it is not the strong start we'd have hoped for. We can see the logic in keeping the hardware simple when it keeps the performance streamlined and costs down. However in this case the hardware is just a bit too weak for any tasks more strenuous than viewing a website, and for a price that rivals more powerful and more feature-rich laptops.
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