The HP Chromebook 14 comes with enough features and the kind of performance that might make you consider switching. This machine is for you if all you need is an affordable device that will let you browse online, tackle basic productivity tasks, send emails, and stream shows. Keep reading our full HP Chromebook 14 review for more.
Contents
1. Price
If your daily computing needs are of the basic and less demanding variety, the HP Chromebook 14 might be the right laptop for you, especially considering it comes in at only $199 (about £230, AU$500).
2. Design
The Chromebook 14 has an attractive design highlighted by a fresh white color variant that is sure to stand out in a crowd. The lid of the Chromebook 14 has a rough texture with a glossy HP logo embossed in the center. Opening the lid reveals a brushed white deck, white keys, and white display bezels.
Yes, part of me worries that this machine will look dirty over time, especially given its target audience: kids and the K-12 market. But the fresh white surfaces are a refreshing move away from the silver chassis typically found on premium machines.
As expected, the Chromebook 14 is made of plastic, though the different textures give it a rugged yet welcome feel.
At 0.7 inches thick and weighing 3.3 pounds, the Chromebook 14 is predictably lighter than the 15-inch Acer Chromebook 15 (0.8 inches, 3.7 pounds) and Asus Chromebook C523NA (3.8 pounds), but, as expected, heavier than the 11.6-inch Dell Chromebook 5190 (2.9 pounds).
Port selection is good. The left side of the Chromebook 14 has a USB Type-C port, a USB 3.0 port, and a lock slot. On the right side are a microSD card slot, a headphone jack, and another pair of USB 3.0 and USB Type-C ports.
3. Keyboard and touchpad
With the Chromebook 14, HP demonstrated the growing appeal of Chrome OS. With its low price, attractive design, and very good battery life, the Chromebook 14 is a very affordable choice for users on a budget.
The Chromebook 14’s Chiclet (square keys, rounded corners) provides a very pleasant typing experience. The keyboard on the Chromebook 14 has the distinctive design of Chromebooks: the Caps Lock button is replaced by a Search button, while the F-key row is replaced with navigation buttons such as page forward, page back, do new, expand, minimize windows …
The downside of the keyboard on the Chromebook 14 is the slightly low force response. In our test, LaptopMag hit typing speed of nearly 58 words/minute, up to 9 words/minute lower than the desktop keyboard.
With the Chromebook 14, HP demonstrated the growing appeal of Chrome OS. With its low price, attractive design, and very good battery life, the Chromebook 14 is a very affordable choice for users on a budget.
The Chromebook 14’s 10 x 9.5 cm touchpad is large enough for you to scroll comfortably. The mouse buttons also have very good feedback. Unfortunately, unlike Windows laptops, the number of touch gestures dedicated to the touchpad on Chrome OS is still quite low. The drag-to-zoom gesture on Google Maps didn’t work as well as expected.
4. Display
The 14-inch mirror screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels on the Chromebook 14 suffers from a lot of glare, but colors in the movies are very vivid and sharp.
With the Chromebook 14, HP demonstrated the growing appeal of Chrome OS. With its low price, attractive design, and very good battery life, the Chromebook 14 is a very affordable choice for users on a budget.
At 209 nits, the Chromebook 14 is just as bright as the Toshiba Chromebook. The lower brightness Acer Chromebook C720P: 183 nits. All 3 of these products are lower than the 244 nit average of the thin and light laptop segment.
5. Performance
Armed with an Intel Celeron N3350 CPU and 4GB of RAM, the Chromebook 14 has enough power for simple day-to-day tasks, but don’t try running demanding apps on this budget machine.
The real-world test consisted of loading 13 web pages on Google Chrome, two of which played 1080p YouTube videos while another pair streamed video games on Twitch. The first few pages loaded just fine, but then some tabs got stuck on the spinning wheel for several minutes and my cursor started to lag. Photos and ads took particularly long to render, while videos buffered for a few seconds before I could view them.
The Chromebook 14 scored a paltry 2,733 on the Geekbench 4 overall performance test, falling well short of the Chromebook C523NA (4,698), the Chromebook 5190 (4,193), and the Chromebook average (4,747). The AMD version of the Chromebook 14 performed even worse (1,283).
With a score of 57.8 on the JetStream Javascript benchmark, the Chromebook 14 narrowly topped the Chromebook 5190 (54.5) but lost out to the Chromebook C523NA (65.6), Chromebook 15 (66.6), and the average Chromebook (77.5).
6. Battery Life
The Chromebook 14 will stay powered up for an entire workday. The laptop endured for a very good 9 hours and 18 minutes on our battery test (continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness). That edges out the Chromebook average (9:10) and the Acer Chromebook 15 (9:07) and crushes the Chromebook C523NA (6:30) and the AMD version of the Chromebook 14 (6:23).
In conclusion, we have given you a detailed HP Chromebook 14 review to consider.
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