We're getting new Chromebooks all over the price spectrum lately. We recently reviewed the brand-new Chromebook Pixel, which has hardware that's well worth $1,000 even though that's a lot to pay for a system running Chrome OS. Today we're taking a closer look at one of the new $149 Chromebooks, which are cheaper than any Chrome OS laptop has been to date.
We weren't really sure what to expect from Hisense's $149 Chromebook. We've seen Hisense hardware before in the form of $99 and $149 Android tablets from a time when those things hadn't become common. Those devices were OK, but they cut enough corners that we had trouble recommending them for people who could spend a little more. This Chromebook, on the other hand, is surprisingly good—it's still budget hardware to be sure, but in many respects it's pretty similar to the $199 to $299 Chromebooks that are already out there.
Look and feel
The Hisense Chromebook is all plastic, about like you’d expect. Both the top and bottom are covered in a matte textured material that looks pretty good, while the palmrest is a smooth matte plastic instead.
The port selection isn’t bad for the size or the price. There’s a USB 2.0 and an HDMI port on the left side and another USB port plus a microSD card reader on the right side. We’d have liked to have seen USB 3.0 instead of 2.0 and full-size SD rather than microSD, but with a Chromebook you’ll be using cloud storage more often than USB drives or SD cards.
The laptop doesn’t feel any cheaper than the Chromebooks you can get for $300-and-down. They’re all plastic, they’re all pretty light, they’re all a little bendy and creaky but not any more than you’d expect. The weakest point, as it usually is, is the 11.6-inch 1366×768 display. It’s a cheap TN panel with all of that screen technology's typical shortcomings—shallow viewing angles, poor contrast, and sort of dulled colors.
This isn't a knock against the Hisense Chromebook specifically—most of them are like this. There are only a handful of exceptions to the rule: the one-and-a-half-year old HP Chromebook 11, the expensive Chromebook Pixel, and the more recent Toshiba Chromebook 2 among them. Every cheap Chromebook comes with a compromise, and in this one the mediocre screen is the most keenly felt.
The chiclet-style keyboard has a good layout and spacing. As with any Chromebook, the standard function keys are replaced by Chrome OS-style function keys, the Caps Lock key is replaced with a Search key, and things like the Windows and Command keys on other keyboards are jettisoned in favor of wider Ctrl and Alt keys.
The keyboard's layout and key sizing is good. Most Chromebooks these days seem to be shipping with the same keyboard layout, which is a good thing for usability, whether it’s just a coincidence or some kind of requirement from Google. Keyboard feel and key travel are less consistent, and here the keys are kind of shallow and mushy as they often are on cheap laptops.
The trackpad, likewise, is about what you’d expect. It’s a single plastic surface that works OK but isn’t great. We had the most trouble clicking and dragging, as if the trackpad was having trouble tracking our second finger once our first finger was down. Things like basic finger tracking and two-finger scrolling were generally better. All in all the keyboard and trackpad aren’t great, but they’re livable.
Internals and performance
Actually benchmarking Chrome OS devices is still tricky, since browser-based benchmarks are mostly single-threaded, and conventional CPU and GPU benchmarks don't really exist. Normally it's not a huge deal because the chips in Chromebooks have already shown up in some laptop or tablet we can benchmark, so we at least know how the chips perform relative to one another.
For all of these new low-cost Chromebooks, unfortunately, we’re looking at a chip we’ve never seen before: Rockchip’s RK3288. This budget SoC combines four 1.8GHz 32-bit Cortex A17 CPU cores with four Mali T760 GPU cores and a few other niceties like 4K H.265 decoding support. Cortex A17 is intended to approximate the performance of 2012’s Cortex A15 in a lower power envelope.
We dug out another ARM Chromebook to compare this to, 2013’s HP Chromebook 11. It used a 1.7GHz dual-core Cortex A15 CPU combined with a Mali T604 GPU. The single-threaded browser benchmarks will help us compare A15 and A17, at least.
Cortex A17 is nearly identical to Cortex A15 in these tests. The slight speed increases can be attributed mostly to the chip’s 100MHz clock speed advantage.
But in actual use, Hisense's Chromebook is much more responsive than HP’s. To get some kind of multithreaded CPU numbers, we did some creative backflips: we installed Ubuntu 14.04 on both laptops with Crouton, unearthed an old ARM Linux build of Geekbench 2, and ran the tests.
So yes, having double the CPU cores really helps the Hisense Chromebook out, and it feels more like an Intel Chromebook in practice. The 2GB RAM limit is a bigger bottleneck than CPU performance is, and the system gradually lags more as you open more tabs and windows. Like all 2GB Chromebooks, it functions best for light users.
Battery life
Google and Hisense promise “up to 8.5 hours” of battery life, though in our testing the laptop fell short of that by about an hour and a half. That 8.5 hour figure may be attainable with lower screen brightness settings and very light use, but normally you can expect runtime somewhere in between the older ARM Chromebooks and the best of the Haswell- and Broadwell-based Chromebooks. Our WebGL test suggests that you’ll see a significant drop in battery life once you’re pegging the CPU and GPU.
What do you want? It's $149
The Hisense Chromebook isn’t going to win any awards, but at a certain point you have to ask yourself what you could possibly expect for $149. It provides a good, basic experience that doesn’t feel as slow as some past ARM Chromebooks have. To get a significantly better machine—Haswell or Broadwell processor, 4GB of RAM, and much-improved battery life—you’re looking at a $249 or $299 computer. That’s a pretty big price hike if cost is what’s most important to you.
The biggest downside to either of the $149 Chromebooks might be their retailer exclusivity. Schools and businesses buy lots of Chromebooks, and they usually need to deal with more established OEMs with better support options. For any individual looking for a cheap Chromebook, though, you could do a lot worse.
The good
Feels pretty well-made for $149.
It's $149!
Performance isn't bad, especially compared to older ARM Chromebooks.
Nice keyboard layout.
The bad
Keyboard and trackpad are OK but sometimes tweaky.
Battery life isn't quite up to what Intel Chromebooks offer.
Mediocre screen.
The ugly
Wal-Mart exclusive.
