When you’re out and about with your Chromebook, how does it perform?
Picture the scene. You’re at a factory or building site, and need to incorporate some new figures into a spreadsheet and email it back to the office. You left your MacBook at home as you didn’t want to risk damaging it, so how will your Chromebook cope? Should you be worried, and if so, what about?
One thing you definitely don’t need to be concerned about is battery life. A combination of a low-powered processor and a minimalistic operating system combine to give Chromebooks an amazing power efficiency. The model we’re using, the Acer Chromebook 314, runs for over 12 hours on a single charge, beating the 16-inch MacBook Pro and being not too far behind the 13-inch MBP and the MacBook Air. It charges through a USB-C cable, so you can take a portable battery pack with you for extra power, or plug it in while on a train or aircraft. This excellent battery life also makes it a great living-room notebook, for when you want to check your emails or look something up online without popping into your home office and starting up your Mac.
Talking about starting up, the Chromebook does so extremely quickly. Again, the no-frills operating system shows its worth. Our Acer Chromebook 314 starts up in about eight seconds, and most other Chromebook models are similarly speedy. This also helps to save battery life, as if you know you’re going to be a few days without a charge, you can save power by turning off your notebook and switching it on again when you need it, instead of simply closing the lid.
As mentioned before, emailing is a straightforward affair on a Chromebook. We chose to use webmail services rather than email client apps, as it means we can delete Gmail and the email apps we installed when setting up, saving valuable storage space. As the internal SSD is only 32GB, storage is at a premium, so every bit and byte counts.
After launching Google Chrome we opened our webmail sites, which we’d pinned to the left-hand side of the browser as permanent tabs.This feature works exactly like it does in Safari, making the process agreeably familiar. Answering work emails through our company’s ISP’s webmail service proved simple enough. The keyboard proved comfortable to type on, and very responsive. It's not as good as a MacBook's keyboard, or the Magic Keyboard you get with an iMac, but for a low-cost computer it’s very impressive. For a while we found ourselves pressing the Alt key instead of the CTRL key when carrying out tasks such as copying and pasting, but quirks like this are to be expected when
