HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook Review

Try to sell most of us a laptop that can’t run normal programs, never mind traditional operating systems such as Windows 8 or OS X, and instead only runs a web browser – forcing you to do everything online – and we’d hesitate.

ut that’s precisely what a Chromebook like the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook is; a laptop that boots into the lightweight operating system Chrome OS, where all you can do is launch Google’s Chrome web browser.

It might sound like a product that nobody in their right mind would buy, but there are two reasons why it’s not as clear cut as that. The first is that we’ve actually come to quite like Chromebooks here at TechRadar, and not just because they’re cheap – we’ll come to why shortly.

The other reason, though, is that what started as a tiny dribble of models and manufacturers has turned if not into a torrent then into a steady trickle. Of course just because we’re seeing an increasing number of Chromebooks hit the market it doesn’t mean they must be successful, but PC manufacturers wouldn’t bother making and marketing Chromebooks if they didn’t think there was at least a potential market.

Chrome OS won’t suit everyone. It may not even suit most people yet, but it’s true that it’s constantly evolving, and so are our computing habits and plastic card. So while you can’t currently do video editing, professional photography editing or coding on a Chromebook – although online services are springing up that at least begin to address these demands – many of us would cope fine with just a web browser.

Think about what you do on a traditional PC, for example, and there’s a good chance either that you do essentially everything through a browser anyway – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, webmail – or that those things that you currently do with regular apps such as Word and Excel could be replaced with web services such as Google Docs.

You might think, that’s all very well, but if these are all web apps, I have to be online to use them, and since the Pavilion 14 doesn’t have a SIM card slot for 3G mobile browsing, it’s just a useless door-stop when I can’t get Wi-Fi access. But as we’ll see, that’s not quite the case.

Let’s start, though, with the specs. Now, specs with a Chromebook mean a little less than they do with normal laptops, so we can’t just put a Chromebook next to a laptop from Lenovo, Asus, Dell or even HP and say that because it has a weaker processor, less storage, a lower-res screen and fewer, lower-specced ports that it’s worse.

That’s because, since Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system whose only job is to run a browser – albeit a fast, capable browser with support for complex HTML 5 and Flash – the hardware needs comparatively little oomph to do its job well.

Storage is courtesy of a 16GB SSD, which we think is the right choice; the 320GB hard disk in the Acer C7 is a bit redundant in a computer that’s designed to be a thin client to web services, and because hard disks are slower than solid-state drives, all it did was slow the overall responsiveness of the machine down.

Put together, nothing about these core specs suggest anything other than pedestrian performance, but in fact they’re more than sufficient for a Chromebook. The HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook feels slick and fast and responsive, and it coped well with everything we threw at it.

There are three USB 2.0 ports – no, no USB 3.0, but that’s totally fine, since a Chromebook would have no real use for a faster connection, at least in its current incarnation – and an HDMI port, which is extra useful now that Chrome OS supports extended desktop view as well as mirroring on an external monitor.

The HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook’s lacklustre battery life is in part because of the large 14-inch screen that needs to be backlit, and in part because of the Intel processor. It might seem silly to harp on about battery life, but if you’re constantly worried about running out of juice, never mind not able to do a full work day on a single charge, owning a laptop won’t be a particular pleasure.

But on the other hand, the Intel processor does mean that the Pavilion 14 is fast and capable, and although its fan is very noisy, it only kicks in if you’re really hammering it. Unlike with the ARM-powered Samsung Series 3 (which we still like a great deal), it happily plays iPlayer HD streams, even if the mediocre display doesn’t showcase them particularly well. The trade-off, though, is that the Samsung Chromebook lasts for about twice as long on a charge.

It’s not just the screen that lets it down as a movie machine, though; despite the Altec Lansing logo – a brand we’ve come to respect for mid-range speaker docks – the speakers are thin. In their favour, they’re plenty loud, and don’t really break up much unless you’re right at 100%, but at no point along the volume slider would you think of listening to your music or watching movies by choice.

The layout isn’t quite to our taste either. It’s nice that the generous chassis gives us space for another vertical row of keys for page up, down, delete (as well as backspace) and more, but any keyboard that doesn’t put your backspace key at the top-right is likely to play merry hell with your muscle memory.

What’s more, we’re not fond of the arrow keys, with full size left and right, but two half-height keys sandwiched between them for up and down.

Still, we like the dedicated Chrome OS keys for navigation and window management, and unlike on some Chromebooks, there’s a caps lock key as well as two system-wide search buttons. Plus, although the trackpad keys were a bit clunky (you can enable tap-to-click as well), we were quite fond of the textured trackpad surface.