Samsung Chromebook Series 5 review

As the first laptop to come pre-loaded with Chrome OS, Samsung's Series 5 Chromebook has certainly made an impression, but is it right for business? Tom Morgan and Alan Lu take an in-depth look.

IT Pro Verdict

As a thin client, Chrome OS is mostly a success; its ability to work solely within the cloud means it's very well locked down, but this also means it's entirely dependent on an internet connection. Without one, its usefulness is currently severely restricted. If these two points aren’t an issue, it is an excellent way to reduce your hardware acquisition and support costs over the equivalent Windows machine, but even so given the current limitations and restrictions in the design of Chrome OS we would think very, very carefully before committing to even a small-scale deployment.

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The large, responsive and comfortable keyboard is one of the best-designed hardware features of the Samsung ChromeBook Series

The large, responsive and comfortable keyboard is one of the best-designed hardware features of the Samsung ChromeBook Series 5.

We were less impressed with the oversized touchpad. With no physical buttons, you have to press the bottom edge of the pad to register a mouse click unless you choose to enable tap-to-click. Right clicks require a two-finger press, but we found that it would often fail to detect a second finger and make a left click instead. It was responsive and easily large enough to navigate the screen, but we still would have preferred physical buttons.

The quality of the 12.1in screen is in line with what we'd expect from a netbook, with below average viewing angles and very little screen tilt but it is at least very bright. The 1,280x800 pixel resolution is ideal for web browsing, however, and we appreciated the matt screen finish that diffuses light reflections very well. Unsurprisingly, the Series 5 has very similar internal components to those of a Windows-based netbook. Chrome OS doesn't have any memory restrictions, unlike Windows 7 Starter, so Samsung has installed 2GB of RAM. This is paired with the 1.67GHz Intel Atom N570 dual-core processor so it should be more than fast enough for web browsing, but it's still possible to push it to its limits when multiple tabs displaying demanding web apps are running.

Tom Morgan
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