Hasta La Gadget!

Oh, HP. How you try.

The company just pulled the sheet back on its first Chromebook, the Pavilion 14 Chromebook. But in traditional HP fashion, the notebook is bulky and expensive. At $329, the most expensive new Chromebook on the market. It’s a cool $80 more than the much-sleeker Samsung Chromebook and a $130 more than the Acer C7.

The extra cash nets buyers a 14-inch screen and a Intel x86 chipset rather than an ARM chip inside the Samsung. All three models have 2GB of RAM. The Intel 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 CPU chipset inside the HP likely runs slightly better than the ARM chip. But this is a Chromebook. You run Chrome on a Chromebook. Not Photoshop. The Samsung Chromebook correctly mashes a sleek casing with a computing platform in an affordable package. The HP does not.

Not only is the HP more expensive, it’s significantly bulkier at 4 lbs rather than 2.5 lbs in the Samsung. Plus, strangely, the battery in this larger notebook is rated for 2 hours less use time than Samsung’s (4.25 hours vs 6.5 hours).

It’s hard to find anything to get excited about on the new HP Chromebook. Wait… It has an Ethernet port! Ummm…

Remember last week when HP leaked a 14-inch Chromebook on its own site? That was a big surprise, to say the least — the company has never put out a Chrome OS system before, and we weren’t aware this was even that popular a category. Well, HP just officially announced the Pavilion 14 Chromebook, and pretty much the only surprise is the availability date: we had heard it would go on sale February 17th, but it’s actually available today for $330.

Suffice to say, that’s more than what you’ll pay for Samsung’s Chromebook ($249) or Acer’s C7 ($199). For the money, it offers similar specs as the Acer C7, but the design appears considerably more polished. Meanwhile, with a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 CPU and 2GB of RAM, it should perform a bit better than the Samsung model, which has a nice design, but chugs along on a lower-powered ARM processor. Like most other Chromebooks, this one has 16GB of built-in flash storage, along with a 1,366 x 768 display. Users also get 100GB of Google Drive space (free for the first two years).

All told, this 14-inch system weighs about four pounds, making it not only the biggest Chromebook on the market, but the heaviest. At least that 0.8-inch chassis makes room for a good selection of ports: HDMI output, three USB 2.0 sockets and an SD reader. It even has an Ethernet jack, something that Samsung’s removed from its latest Chrome OS device. Unfortunately, though, a bigger footprint doesn’t mean a bigger battery: the Pavilion 14 Chromebook is rated for four hours and 15 minutes of runtime, putting it behind Samsung’s model. So, are a sleek design and stronger performance worth the premium? We’ll tackle that in our eventual review, but if you buy today you’ll just have to make that call yourself. Check the PR after the break or Google’s Chrome Blog (linked below) more info.

Filed under: Laptops, Google, HP

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Google has been making quite the push to make its Chromebooks available to schools as they recently announced discounts for schools to pick up their own Chromebooks for $99 each until December 21. Today, Google is announcing 2,000 schools are using Chromebooks for Education around the world.

Google didn’t announce if its discount program had anything to do with the rise in Chromebooks being used in schools, but when you consider there were only 1,000 schools listed as using Chromebooks, then the math certainly adds up.

Along with today’s announcement, Google highlighted some of the schools that recently joined the Chromebooks for Education program that include Transylvania County Schools with 900 devices, St. Thomas Aquinas High School with 2,200 devices and Rocketship Education with 1,100 devices. If you’re currently attending any of those schools, you just received your shout-out for the day simply by helping your students learn with a Chromebook. You never see Apple give shout-outs for schools that buy their computers for their classrooms, do you?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Conjures $82 Million Innovation Fund For French Media, Google AdWords Helped Man Get Hooked Up ,

HP is a name that many of us are familiar with, and it seems that the PC giant is going to dip their toes in a relatively new market, that of the Chromebook. Yes sir, it seems that a HP Chromebook is in the pipeline, following after the likes of Samsung, Acer, and Lenovo in a bid to further expand their market reach. In fact, HP is said to have published a specifications sheet for the Pavilion Chromebook 14-c010us which revealed a 4-pound model that ran on a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 processor, carrying a 16GB SSD, 14-inch LED-backlit display that has 1,366 x 768 resolution, a trio of USB 2.0 ports (oh, why didn’t they throw in USB 3.0 instead to keep up with the times?) and a webcam, of course.

Word has it that the HP Chromebook will ship in the weeks to come, sporting an advertising embargo date of February 17. The spec sheet read, “The HP Pavilion Chromebook gives you fast and easy access to the things you love and depend on, from a world of Google apps and services to your photos and social networks. And since it’s the first Chromebook with a 14-inch diagonal design, you get full-size comfort without giving up full-on mobility.”

We do hope to grab more information on the details of the HP Chromebook such as its exact availability as well as price, and if priced correctly, it looks set to move. Samsung might want to watch out for their backs here!

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Facebook Outage, PayPal Outage Cause For Concern,

This week it appears that HP is getting set up to work with a Pavilion-branded Chromebook, pumped up and ready to take action with the rest of the extremely inexpensive machines that Samsung and Acer have created thus far. We’ve had our hands-on review looks at the newest Samsung Series 3 Chromebook and Acer C7 Chromebook, now it’s time for HP to bring what we’re expecting will be one of the least hardcore versions of their lineup to the Chromebook world. I say least hardcore simply because HP has been known for and has proven to us that they are, indeed, hardcore with their Elite lineup top to bottom – with Chrome the game is altogether different.

The specifications for this Chromebook from HP show it to be a 14-inch display-toting HP-looking beast, that meaning it’ll at first appear very much to be a high powered Pavilion by all outward appearances. Once you’re inside you’ll find that its size and weight foretell its abilities – 3.96
lb (1.8 kg) and you’ll wonder how powerful it could possibly be. Inside you’ve got SSD storage and connectivity to Google Drive for cloud storage, and of course the software is mostly web-based so your processing power is mostly surrounding what you’ll be able to do in your Chrome web browser.

The power you do get is an Intel Celeron Processor 847 clocked at 1.1GHz. That’s not a misprint, this machine literally has what appears to be a processor with less power than your smartphone. That’s alright though, and you can chill, because with 2GB DDR3 SDRAM and support for up to 4GB, you’ll be rolling out hard with whatever you’ll need to do in the Chrome OS without a doubt. The display is an LED-backlit unit with BrightView technology and 1366 x 768 pixel resolution as well, so videos you’ll be watching via Google Play will be as high definition as they get.

NOTE: All of the info you see here comes from a Product PDF straight from HP’s shopping center. At the moment it appears that the “ad embargo date” is set for the 17th of February, 2013, so you can expect it to hit shelves soon!

This machine at the moment is spec’d to work with wifi only, but we’re expecting a mobile version in the future as well. This Chromebook has 3 USB 2.0 ports as well as 1HDMI out, 2 Rj-45 port (LAN), and a headphone/microphone combo port. The unit itself is just 0.83 inches thick at its thickest point, 13.66 inches wide, 9.37 inches deep, and will be coming in at 4 hours and 15 minutes battery time in this first iteration. Sound like the winner you’re looking for? We’ll be seeing official confirmation of this machine soon – and we’ll likely see it in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2013 as well!

HP Pavilion Chromebook leaked for February 17th is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
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