I’d love to say that the Chromebook has been my personal revolution in computing, that the always connected everything in the cloud has been the making of me, but it hasn’t. The Chromebook has simply slotted into my everyday routine. There’s been nothing special about the way it works and it has performed exactly as I had hoped.
I saw that someone had done some benchmarking of the Series 3 versus other Chromebooks and found that the other more expensive devices with better processors had gone faster. Well. Duh. It’s not that I object to the idea of empirically testing the speed of one device against another, but I have to question the usefulness in this specific case.
Chromebooks aren’t doing all that much really and that one device opens a new tab fractionally faster than another is beyond my scope of important things to worry about. I suppose adding scores and graphs makes things more official in that you have hard data over a gut feeling, but I really don’t see the value.
The Chromebook has never felt sluggish or slow to respond as far as I’m concerned and that’s all I care about. I say that as someone who regularly uses a Mac Pro with lots of RAM - I’m sure even the MacBook this Chromebook has replaced with it’s Dual Core Intel Core 2 Duo could smash the Samsung all over the shop in a comparable benchmarking test. Problem is, that for the day to day stuff there’s no discernible difference to me. Tabs open and websites render as expected.
I’m on a train and the Chromebook is connected to the flakey but free Wi-Fi any thus far it’s coping manfully with the in and out up and down slow then really slow challenges that such a system throws up. However, I’m still worried about being somewhere without a net connection and needing to do some work or surf the internet.
I’ve added a tethering option to my iPhone bill to ease those worries, but I fear that no matter what I may always have this fear with the Chromebook in much the same way as battery life was with my MacBook.
One final point that speaks to the build quality of this very cheap laptop is that the screen isn’t wobbling despite the fact the train I’m on is shifting at some considerable speed towards That London.
Also, Google PR replied to my question about the SIM slot, it is indeed a dummy and I’ve noticed that PC World has ceased selling the Seires 3 bundled with a data SIM.
Remember people, £239
