Review of the Chromebook C730

Just to clear things up, so people don't get confused; this is a review of the Chromebook C730-C8T7.

Why?

Why a review of a device that is seriously outdated and under-specced by its successors? Well, truth be told this is my first tech review and it made sense to do it about a device that actually changed my opinion, the more and more I used it. Plus, for some crazy reason, it still is being sold on sites like Amazon, Ebay and others...

So...

This device ships with Chrome-OS. For those who don't know what it is, it's the famous Chrome web browser... and that's it. All the extensions and themes work, but that's basically what you've got to play with. They've tried to make it a lightweight OS by building it on top of Linux and well... on this machine it's a bit 'urgh'. We'll come back to the software in a bit, so lets focus on the hardware

Hardware:

Processor:

The processor that ships with this in the Intel Celeron N2840, with a maximum clock rate of 2.16Ghz. While my first impression was to cringe at the thought of using a Celeron, they've come a long way in the last few years and albeit a bit sluggish, it's not an overly unpleasant experience. With a maximum TDP of 7.5W too, this meant Acer skipped putting a fan in and just opted for passive cooling. There are far better processors out there and some manufactures have opted for using higher end processors like Dell's that uses an i3. All at the sacrifice of cost, however. 

Graphics:

I only write this after the processor section as this uses Intel's integrated graphics solution.  On a basic page, you're fine but when you start using pages that run a lot of active graphical content (like Facebook) you'll see lag and stuttering. The only way this could have been rectified is to have used a processor with better integrated graphics. 

Display:

With an 11" screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, using it to watch movies is quite nice. I've never been one to particularly fuss about screens. Viewing angles aren't great, but I've been able to sit outside on a sunny day and use it comfortably. Colour production is adequate for it's intended uses too. Sure, it's not full HD but on an 11" screen, I think it's enough. Cheapness is this devices selling point. 

RAM:

For me, this is the device's biggest failing. It uses 2GB of lower power DDR3 RAM. It just isn't enough. A couple of tabs open is enough to crash the machine, while running Chrome-OS. You'll get a horrible experience switching between tabs. Thank goodness I've used Google Sheets (which saves automatically and often) otherwise I would have lost a fair few amount of documents. Even those who have their Chromebooks in developer mode and enable SWAP memory, will still suffer. 

Battery:

With low power RAM, a not very powerful processor and small display, this is where this Chromebook shines. You can easily get 2 days out of this thing and when you start playing with brightness even more! When opening up this model, I immediately noticed that half of it is battery. There again, battery life is usually the main point of buying a Chromebook. For those who are interested it's capacity is 3220mAh.

Connectivity:

It was nice to see an Intel AC wireless card. AC does not stand for air conditioning, it's the latest standard in WiFi, allowing you to get speedy connections. I've not done any benchmarks on the speed, but did not expedience any problems while streaming Netflix or remote sessions. Of course, that also depends on your internet speed. Coupled with the wireless is Bluetooth, in case you need to hook up a wireless keyboard or speaker. I often used my Chromebook for listening to Spotify through a bluetooth speaker, again, with no problems. Being a light portable, I wasn't that surprised to find a lack of ethernet port, not that this is a problem, just something to bear in mind. 

At 11" this device is extremely portable

On the back of the device, there's a full size HDMI for hooking up to an external screen. To the left a USB 3.0 port and the right hand side of the device USB 2.0 with a 3.5mm headphone jack. All pretty standard really. 

Storage: 

The device comes with 16GB  of eMMC storage, if you're using Chrome-OS, because of the size it will periodically clear your Downloads folder, so watch out! Most Chrome-OS devices come with an offer for Google Drive space and the file explorer quickly allows you to drag and drop stuff to the cloud, so for large files either use that or a USB drive. Something I would have liked to see here, is a built in method for connecting to local network drives (like my NAS) but instead I had to use an extension that didn't really work well. 

Software:

Like I said before, the device ships with Chrome-OS. With the default settings, gets an update almost weekly which will often require a restart. No pushy messages making you install it, which is nice though for the purpose of security, you should install updates as soon as they come out. If you've used chrome then there's no learning curve here. 

In the bottom left of the screen, you get a launcher for your Chrome extensions installed. The right gives you you're status icons, similar to Windows. The software is intuitive. It's really designed to be easy and fast and that's all I feel there is to say about usability. 

I really feel like this is what pulls the device back. Of course there aren't any simpler alternatives now, so it's what the industry is using. Even in Developer Mode (the tech-savvy-mode) it would have been nice to see apt-get and some other useful Linux utilities. When I've used the terminal on this machine, it feels like I'm using a useless Linux machine - what's the point of using Linux if I can't customise it and use apps that I want? 

So, I ditched Chrome-OS

This is where I started enjoying my device. I wiped ChromeOS and installed Linux. If you want a guide on doing that, I'll post a link. In return, I got a lot of things:

Noot..noot noot noot (to the Intel tune)

• I had a device which I could store movies on and not worry about them being deleted. In fact, I could store about 4 movies at any one time. 
• The ability to have utilities that I wanted like: nano, nmap, the Spotify client
• Better RAM management - I was able to install Chrome within Linux with multiple tabs and still only be using just over 1GB of RAM
• More security - I was able to use LVM hardware encryption
• Just a better overall experience

If you're tech savvy and have this Chromebook, I seriously recommend doing this. I was able to make good use of the hardware and this is where my thinking of Chrome-OS  being a bit 'urgh' comes from. It seems as if Google are missing something. Maybe there will be updates in the future that solve some of these problems, but you don't get that impression when Chromebooks today are coming out with better hardware to accommodate a more power hungry Chrome-OS. 

Summary:

I just wouldn't buy one. I see it as a cheap computer that Acer have tried to make, but for my tastes it is just that bit too cheap. Especially when it's usually the case for ~£50 more you could be getting something with a big improvement on the hardware front. To add to that point, I never bought mine; I was given it to me by my university. If this review has been helpful, feel free to post any comments of ask questions!