Hasta La Gadget!

Aside from the new Acer Chromebook, we also got a hands-on look at the new HP Chromebook 14. The latest Haswell-powered Chromebook from HP comes in an array of eye-popping colors — Snow White, Ocean Turquoise and Coral Peach — which certainly makes them the most colorful Chromebooks we’ve ever seen. In person, the colors seem bright and playful, though we can’t help but feel they look like they belong in Toys R Us rather than an electronics store. The Chromebook’s chassis is made out of plastic, which makes the whole thing seem even more toy-like. The top cover has a smooth rubberized finish, but the plastic-molded keyboard feels a bit gritty; the texture reminds us of the material used in 3D printing.

As the name suggests, the Chromebook 14 has a 14-inch display with 1,366 x 768 resolution. It looked bright enough underneath the convention center’s lighting, though it’s difficult to tell after just a few minutes of use. It’s certainly not the lightest Chromebook we’ve ever held — it measures about 0.81-inch thin and weighs in at a whopping 4.08 pounds. HP opted to adhere to the standard Chromebook keyboard layout instead of its own, and the trackpad has just a single button instead of the two found on the HP Pavilion 14. Other features include a HDMI port, 16GB of storage, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, an HD webcam, an SD card slot and a battery that promises up to 9.5 hours of continuous use. If you decide to buy one, it comes with 100GB of Google Drive for free for two years. The HP Chromebook 14 is priced at around $299.99 to start, and should be available for purchase before the holiday season. To get a closer look at the candy-colored laptops, have a peek at the gallery or hit the video after the break. %Gallery-slideshow83881%

Filed under: Laptops, Google, Intel, HP

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One of the first Chromebooks to come blessed with Intel’s Haswell processor is the new Acer Chromebook, and we had a chance to get a closer look at it today. If it wasn’t for the “new” moniker that Acer has so kindly bestowed on it, we would be hard-pressed to find much different about it when compared to its C7 predecessor at first glance. Yet it does seem just a touch lighter and slimmer, measuring around 0.75 inch thin and weighing in at about 2.76 pounds. However, the new Acer Chromebook has a supposedly much longer battery life, boasting up to 8.5 hours of continuous use. It also sports an HDMI port, two USB ports and an SD card slot on the side. The 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 resolution display is a little on the small side, but still looked crisp and colorful enough to our eyes. The raised chiclet keys on the keyboard felt tactile and comfortable to use, and should be familiar to anyone who’s ever used a Chromebook. While we don’t know its price just yet, we do know that you’ll get a 100GB of Google Drive storage for free for two years with every purchase. We don’t have much more information about the new Acer Chromebook to impart to you, unfortunately, but we’ll be sure to update this post once we do. In the meantime, have a peek at the hands-on gallery and video after the break. %Gallery-slideshow83878%

Filed under: Laptops, Google, Intel

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In its morning Keynote at IDF 2013, Intel has officially launched its Bay Trail system-on chip (SoC) that has been designed to compete with chips from Qualcomm or NVIDIA in mobile devices. A Bay Trail system can use up to four CPU cores and it will integrate Intel’s own graphics processor, which is a derivative of Intel’s HD graphics launched some time ago on the PC. Previously, Intel had licensed IP from Imagination technologies, which provides graphics core for Apple and many other mobile chip vendors.

Bay Trail is extremely important for Intel’s mobility business and at the moment the products built on this architecture are the Atom Z3700 Series and Z3600 Series. It can also be used in laptops and notebook, but will appear as “Pentium” (mostly quad-core) or “Celeron” (mostly dual-core) and if you had not noticed, Bay Trail uses the Intel Silvermont CPU core design. (more…)

Intel Bay Trail Chip For Power-Efficient “Full Windows” Tablets original content from Ubergizmo.

Chromebooks aren’t known for being the beefiest machines out there, but they’re getting some hot new guts. Google just dropped the news that there are Chromebooks on the way rocking Intel’s new 4th generation CPUs, bringing serious computing power and better battery life to the table.

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There can be little doubt that the low-cost computer universe has begun to accept Chrome OS into its life, especially given today’s confirmation by Intel that a new generation of Chromebooks will be working with Haswell. This is Intel’s 4th Generation core technology, and as Intel and Google have made clear, it’s expected that this […]