Dissenters have been mocking Google’s efforts to popularize the Samsung Chromebook and other laptops of its kind. Now that India has welcomed the notebook, it remains to be seen whether it will get a warm reception or not. The price is marked at Rs 26,990. But this is certainly not the bit that should bother you.
Chromebooks don’t run on a regular operating system (OS) such as Windows XP or Mac OS X. They get their kicks from Google’s Chrome OS instead which is mostly just the browser going by the same name. This means that you’d need to be permanently connected to the internet or Wi-Fi in order to access most of their handy functions.
The Samsung laptop has an 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768p resolution display and works on an Exynos 5 Dual processor. Don’t expect a standard PC interface here since the OS pre-installed onto the system is browser-based. So you’ll be able to load a lot of online and offline apps designed just for it, but will have to do without the full functionality of normally ever-present programs like MS Office.
Showing off a 17.5mm thin profile, the Chromebook is pretty light for a portable PC, weighing just 1.1kg. You get 16GB of SSD storage onboard as well as 100GB of Google Drive space free of charge for up to 2 years. The battery should be able to deliver up to 6.5 hours of average usage. There’s a VGA webcam, dual band Wi-Fi support, an optional 3G dongle, an HDMI port, USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and Bluetooth 3.0.
Croma as well as Flipkart are selling the Samsung notebook online. It can also be purchased through retail stores.