hey everybody gets Lawnside button we’re taking a look today at the Chromebook see four-to-five from Asus I love Chromebooks and they let me borrow this for a couple days to check it out this one will run you anywhere from three hundred to four hundred and fifty dollars depending on configuration and we’re going to take a closer look at what you can do with this device here in just a second now I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure at this did come in on loan from Asus it’s more done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewed or approve what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this Chromebook is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware this is a fourteen inch laptop 1080p the display is IPS so it’s nice and sharp but you will lose your image clarity when you go off center the viewing angles are not as good as I’ve seen on other IPS laptops but some folks might prefer that because you do gain a little more privacy from people looking to the side of the screen but again nonetheless very sharp consistent with other lower-cost IPS displays that I’ve looked at and it’s
actually a little bit brighter than I expected to so altogether decent display on this one core m3 processor inside from Intel this is an eighth generation 8100 Y chip that is fanless so that means this device will not make any noise when it’s running on your desk this particular model came equipped with eight gigabytes of RAM there’s a 4 gigabyte option available and you also have the choice between a 64 gigabyte storage configuration or 128 gigabytes and I think if you are in the market for a Chromebook just to do the basics like web browsing and email go with the 4 gig ram and 64 gigabyte storage option you’re not going to need much more than that but if you are looking to start doing more with your Chromebook like Linux and Android apps you’ll probably want the greater storage and the larger amount of RAM to accommodate all of those activities these devices are getting a lot more interesting because of the fact they run Android and Linux apps so well and that’s something to keep in mind when you’re out shopping but again if you’re just doing the basics go with the minimum save yourself some money and you’ll be in good shape there now the way on this one is 2.8 pounds or 1.2 kilograms so under three pounds pretty lightweight one thing to note though is that this is all plastic it looks metal but it’s not so if you are looking for a higher quality build that may not flex as much you’ll probably want to go with their Chromebook flip which is just a little bit more expensive and has slightly better materials this one is a traditional laptop design so while the display can run flat here it won’t turn into a tablet like that flip version will do and it’s also not a touchscreen so you’ll be doing everything here with the trackpad down on the keyboard deck the keyboard itself though is pretty nice nice large keys they’re kind of raised pretty high to give the keys more travel but I found it was pretty
comfortable to type on it one of the things that I found with ACS laptops from time to time is that their keys tend to be a little smaller this one has nice full-size keys that follow some of the Google standards for how a keyboard should work on a Chromebook I was very happy with the trackpad here it’s nice and big it’s a click pad seems to be pretty accurate and wasn’t registering any false clicks and that sort of thing so I was pleased with the overall IO on this one and the keyboard is backlit as well when you’re in the dark you’ve got a bunch of ports to look at on this one there’s a USB C port here on the left hand side this will do data power and video so it’s a full service USB port the included charger plugs in here but you could use a docking station or any other USB power source and again if you want to hook up an external monitor you’ll do it through the USB C ports this will support a 4k sixty Hertz display so you’ve got some desktop options with it as well over here you’ve got a USB 3 port a full-size USB 3 port for plugging in keyboards mice and hard drives and that sort of thing those can also get plugged into the USB C port you have a headphone jack over here on the other side you’ve got an SD card reader so if you want to augment the
onboard storage you can pop in an SD card there it will sit flush to the side of the laptop so you can have it in all the time and there’s another full servus USBC port on the right hand side so you can plug in your power and display to either side that works best for you so it was good to see a C’s continuing their support for USBC on these Chromebooks I think they add a lot of flexibility now this Chromebook has an end-of-life date of June 2026 that means after that date it no longer receives updates we’re going to start putting these dates on every review so that you’re aware of when support ends for these these computers stay relevant for a long time so it’s important to know when that expiration date is especially if you’re looking at buying one of these in the future after the date the Chromebook still works but it doesn’t receive any additional software updates so let’s take a look now and see how the Chromebook performs we’ll start off here with the basics and work our way through Android and Linux apps in a minute but everything boots up here pretty quickly as you can see very fast on rendering very snappy and responsive and I think for a web browsing device which is its primary function it seems to be doing all of those things quite well even with multimedia rich sites like this so that’s a good thing a little bit earlier we tested its ability to playback higher end video we’ve got a 4k 60 video here running on an external display we did get a few drop frames at the outset but once it got started it was playing back fine with no additional drop frames I also tested 1080p 60 video and experience similar things there so I think for video playback like Netflix and Amazon Prime and some of the other services this will do just fine and of course you can run the Android versions of those services on here as well and download videos for offline viewing too so you have a lot of flexibility with the Chromebook
due to the fact that it has that Android capability – and on the browser bench dorg speedometer test we got a score of one hundred and thirty nine point seven on version 1.0 of that test and eighty three point six on version 2.0 and this score really surprised me because it put this device on par with some high fives we’ve looked at recently and in addition to that it was a lot faster than what we saw with that pixel book go from Google we reviewed just a few weeks ago that had the i5 version of this fanless Intel chip that one should have been a lot faster and it wasn’t and in fact we went back and tested the pixel book again just to make sure something didn’t change in the Chrome OS operating system that may have optimized those benchmark results it was still running about the same so it’s a really fast and zippy Chromebook here based on what it has inside of it now battery life on this one came in at around 8 to 10 hours we did turn the display brightness down slightly but just did all the basics like email and web browsing and a few YouTube videos and we were able to pretty much get all-day battery life out of this device at least a full workday but when you start running some Android games like this that of course will impact things more significantly also if you start running some Linux apps that are more demanding on the processor that will also eat into the battery life a bit more we’re gonna take a look now though at its Android performance I’ve got pub G here loading up and once it is done compiling its resources we’ll take a look and see how this performs all right so here’s pub G running on
the Chromebook here and obviously it’s not an ideal control situation given that we don’t have a touchscreen and the game really doesn’t like to work with keyboard and mouse very well here at least in how I have it currently configured it’s running ok the problem though is that I’m finding a lot of these more demanding android games crash quite a bit on the Chromebook here we also tried call of duty a little bit earlier we couldn’t really get that one to load at all so if you are looking at this as something to play some of these higher-end android games probably not the ideal platform I don’t think many Chromebooks are really at the moment but there are a bunch of Android games that will run in fact most of the casual games shouldn’t give you much of a problem this is one of my favorites here pac-man 256 runs great you can use the keyboard with it a lot of similar games like this one are things that you shouldn’t have too many crashes or other issues with and of course you’ll have the Google Play Store available to you to install those apps so if you’ve purchased Android apps in the past there’s a good chance those apps will be available to you to install again through Google Play you can also install things like Microsoft Word but remember that is going to be the Android version of Microsoft Word not the Windows version so there are some features that won’t carry over I did a video going into depth on this a little bit which you can find down below in the video
description to give you an update as to where Chromebooks are compared to Windows machines in 2020 one other thing to note is that some apps will be available both through the Chrome browser and through Android so you can see here we have the Android version of YouTube along with the web-based version of YouTube what Google is now doing is putting a little icon to indicate what is a browser-based app versus the Android app so you can figure out exactly which one is which now there are some other things though that you can do with Chromebooks now involving Linux let’s take a look and see how it does with those now we’ve previously covered how to get linux working on a Chromebook you just jump into the settings and enable it and once you do you get your command line here and you can begin installing software check out my video that I did on this to learn a little bit more about how you can navigate Linux on Chrome OS now I did install some software a little bit earlier so we’ve got LibreOffice here running with their spreadsheet again this is a Linux app running natively on this Chromebook and if I were to save this file right now it would save on the local storage you can also shoehorn steam on here there’s some rumors that Google is going to support steam more directly on Chrome OS in the future and I was able to get shovelknight installed here what I found with this though is that the steam library kept locking up on me this was not the best experience to get steam working although this morning it seems to be working a little bit better let’s jump into shovelknight here and see how
everything plays I’ll just start the game real quick and see how it runs now one thing that Google has enabled just recently is GPU support in beta form so that means it’ll make use of the Intel graphics built into this chip so you can get better performance now out of linux than you did before but because it’s in beta it’s going to be a bit iffy but this game seems to be running pretty well here about as well as it does on my pixel book go seems to be hovering around 60 frames per second or there abouts and I think these are the kind of games you can expect to play on here obviously the more advanced games that would require an Nvidia at AMD GPU certainly won’t be decent here but there are again games that are playable allowed the retro inspired games like this one and it’s pretty cool to be able to boot up your Steam library on a Chromebook and play a lot of games that are compatible with it now just remember though that this is the Linux version of Steam so only the Linux compatible games will run on your Chromebook the windows only ones will not but there are a lot of games that you likely have in your library that will run on here just remember you don’t have a lot of graphical horsepower here to bring to bear on those games sound quality isn’t bad on the laptop you’ve got to downward firing speakers here they will sound different depending on what surface the laptop is resting on but I found the speakers to be quite loud and clear even though they don’t have a wide range of sounds so if you want better bass and better music quality obviously a pair of headphones will do better for that so
performance wise this is a very nice Chromebook I was very surprised by how well it did on that benchmark and of course a benchmark doesn’t tell the whole story but I did find it to be very snappy and responsive on just regular web browsing but also in Linux and on the Android apps it feels faster than by pixel book go does and it shouldn’t be fast they’re giving it as a slower processor but nonetheless it is performing quite nicely build quality here isn’t great it is all plastic but it’s pretty lightweight and the performance again is something that I’m quite pleased with I do think the the higher spec of this with the larger storage and RAM are a little bit pricey but I think if you can find one at a good price I think you’ll be pleased with the performance overall so not a bad Chromebook here from Asus will try to get in a few more to see what else they’ve got in their repertoire and until next time this is Lian Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lawn tv supporters including gold-level supporters the four guys with quarters podcasts Tom Albrecht Rajesh logic gr and Kalyan Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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