HP 11A G8 EE 11.6" Chromebook - AMD A4 1.6GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, Google Chrome

Product Information

Testing conducted by HP using Google Chrome OS power LoadTest. Battery life will vary and the maximum capacity of the battery will naturally decrease with time and usage. See http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/testing/power-testing for test details. As the name suggests, the Chromebook has an 11.6-inch display. Now for some users it might be an issue as a lot of people like big displays for work or for pleasure. The 11.-6-inch display is a no-frills configuration. You won’t find HDR or even high-resolution but what you get is a screen that is bright and reproduces colours accurately on most occasions. What works immensely in its favour is that you get a touch-enabled display as well. The touchscreen works smoothly and is an added bonus to the whole experience.

Chromebook 11a is really fast when it comes to booting up. Considering that it just has 4GB RAM, it was a pleasant surprise. What works most in its favour is Chrome OS. As we said for Android users, it’s a match made in heaven. Syncing and connecting an Android phone is really easy as is using Google’s apps and services. But it’s not as if since it’s a Chrome OS that other apps and services don’t work properly or you are restricted in any form. The battery life on the HP Chromebook 11a is close to 13 hours, which means that you won’t have to charge it more than once a day. Compared to laptops in similar price range, it certainly gives an edge to the Chromebook 11a. Meanwhile, the left side contains a lone USB 2.0 Type-A port, and that's it. Something to note here: because of the position of the port, it was actually somewhat difficult to insert and remove a USB plug from the port. At times, it felt like I had to really force the connector into the slot. For years now buying a ‘budget’ laptop has been a challenge. If someone has to spend, say somewhere around Rs 25,000 on a laptop, then chances are they will have to make far too many compromises. Either the RAM would be less or the processor would be ‘old’ — something or the other would always be amiss. HP might just solve that problem for once and all with its all-new Chromebook 11a. Priced at Rs 21,999, the Chromebook 11a — as the name suggests — doesn’t run Windows but on Google Chrome OS. At this price point, will you have to make any compromises? Or whether this is the ideal machine for those online classes and getting routine work done? Find out the answers to these questions and more in our review of the HP Chromebook 11a. You really can’t expect the moon and stars at this price, can you? But yes, HP has done a fairly impressive job with the design and display on the Chromebook 11a.A glossy coating means that reflections can be a bit of a problem at some brightness levels, but sat on a train next to a window we found that setting the screen to full brightness effectively countered this problem. Help students reach their potential with cloud-first learning on the durable HP Chromebook 11A G8 EE that keeps pace with active student lifestyles while the fast-booting Chrome OS makes IT management easy.

HP has fitted a high-quality 11in IPS screen with a resolution of 1,366×768. Given that Chrome OS takes up very little of the screen space with clutter and that there’s a full-screen mode, this is plenty of resolution. On this screen size, everything looks incredibly sharp and easy to read. The speakers, located underneath the laptop, are decent for a machine of this price—just don't expect to be blown away by the sound quality at higher volumes. For the most part, they sound just fine. Chromebooks are not known for their gaming prowess (and as you can see so far, low-end models' CPU performance, in general, is barely good enough), but we’d be remiss if we didn’t run GFXBench 5.0, a cross-platform GPU benchmark that stress-tests both low-level and high-level game routines. All of the low-cost Chromebooks in our test set performed poorly, which is not surprising. They are budget machines, after all. If you’re interested in gaming on the go, you’re better off with a Windows-based gaming laptop. In accordance with the Microsoft Silicon Support Policy, HP does not support or provide drivers for Windows 8 or Windows 7 on products configured with Intel or AMD 7th generation and forward processor There’s only 64GB of storage which might be an issue but the microSD card slot ensures you can expand it as per your needs. What you also get is 100GB of Google Drive space for one year.

So, it’s goodbye to the high-speed Intel Core i5 processor that was used in the high-end Chromebook Pixel, and hello to a dual-core Samsung Exynos 5 Dual ARM-based SoC instead. This move would be madness on a Windows-based laptop, but ChromeOS is designed for efficient CPUs. The biggest reason that piqued our interest in the Chromebook 11a is Chrome OS. For a long time now the world has been divided into Windows and Mac and to be fair Chrome OS has been around for a while but it’s only recently that it has been making some dents in the market. In India, however, Chrome OS still remains terribly niche. After using the Chromebook 11a for a while, we can safely say that it’s a travesty not many users are familiar with ChromeOS. Or for that matter why PC brands continue to offer Windows only machines. A touchpad sits just underneath the keyboard. It’s a decent size considering the constraints of a laptop with an 11in screen. It’s intelligent, too, deactivating while you type, so that you don’t accidentally brush against it and move the mouse cursor; if only all Windows laptops would be so smart.