Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook review

There are two USB ports, an SD card reader and a single 3.5mm combined microphone and headphone port. You can use normal headphones in this, but if you want to connect a headset, you’ll have to use one with a three-ring connector rather than two 3.5mm ones. The integrated speakers aren’t loud, but their audio quality is better than most netbooks’, with a decent mid-range and less tinniness on high frequencies than we expected. The laptop has a dual-band Wi-Fi adaptor that can connect to either 2.4GHz or 5GHz wireless networks, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a slot at the rear to take a mobile SIM.

For external monitor connections, the Chromebook has a DisplayPort output, which means you may need an adaptor to hook up to a DVI or HDMI display. Currently, you can only mirror the screen, which is handy for presentations or viewing media on a large screen, but it means that dual-display setups aren’t an option. Luckily, the 12.1in integrated screen is fantastic. It has a resolution of 1,280 x 800 and a non-reflective finish that lets you work in bright light. It also renders skin tones and bright colours in a remarkably accurate and natural way.

We can’t run our usual benchmarks on Chrome OS, but we ran the JavaScript-based SunSpider online benchmark, which completed in 770.6ms. By way of comparison, a 3GHz Core i3-540 did the job in 228ms. The Chromebook still isn’t exactly fast by PC standards, but it’s fast enough for what it needs to do. Battery life is around nine hours, so you shouldn’t need to charge a Chromebook in the middle of a school day.

Samsung’s Chromebook is extremely well made, and Chrome OS 20 fixes many of the problems that users had with earlier versions’ cloud-only ethos. It’s still a cloud-computing client but it no longer turns into a paperweight as soon as you go offline. It’s also much faster and more responsive than the average netbook. Unfortunately, its price means it’s also more expensive than most netbooks, but that still makes it cheaper than most laptops with a comparable screen.

Speed and simplicity remain the major points in its favour; there’s very little you can do to break, slow down or otherwise affect the Chromebook, which makes it a great buy if you’re willing to adopt Google’s cloud-based approach.