First Impressions of the HP Pavilion 14-c001tu Chromebook

So its done, I have handed over my hard earned cash and purchased the  HP Pavilion 14-c001tu Chromebook. While I was in the store I had a quick once over of the Samsung and Acer offerings. The big difference is the obvious screen size. both the samsung and the acer chromebooks have 11 inch screens while The HP has 14 inch screen, but the samsung one is just soooooo pretty. It looks almost identical to a Macbook air and is slim and compact, I was almost going to purchase it instead but in the back of my mind I kept replaying the reports of the cracking screen issues the samsung is having. I decided to pick it up just to have a feel of the weight and build quality and as I lifted it from the bottom right corner of the body I felt the plastic flex under its own weight and that was the finisher for me, sorry samsung!

When I got home I opened up my new HP Pavilion 14-c001tu Chromebook from its pretty HP branded box to find a beautiful slim full size laptop sitting in front of me. I popped in the surprisingly small battery sat down on the couch with it on my lap and opened the screen to my surprise the battery already had a quarter charge and it booted up quickly, very quickly under ten second! I had read that this was one of the main advantages of the Chrome OS and I didn't think i would notice to much of a difference, but it blew me away. I don't know if I will be able to look at my windows laptop without laughing every time I wait for it to boot now.

After selecting languages and agreeing to the terms and conditions (which of course I read in full.... don't we all?) I was presented with a log in screen. I pumped in my existing gmail account and instantly I was on the desktop, I felt like a hacker and literally said "yes, I'm in!" out loud. But now what? well I suppose its time to start sorting out syncing my accounts to this device, I jumped on the Doc's app, and it was already sync'ed with my google drive....... ok that was easy. so I clicked on the Gmail app, again no login required... its already done. Surely it cant be this easy? I thought to myself. then i said to myself ok...... music! lets test these speakers out. I jumped on the app store to get a music player, as I have an android phone and tablet as my current devices at the moment I opted for the "Play Music" App (review to come). I opened the app, and there it is, all my music from my other devices good to go. And i was done, no copying existing files from another computer over the network or on a external hard drive, no saving account passwords, everything just worked! Honestly I was a little disappointed, half the fun of a new devices is setting it up to your likings and rediscovering old files while you transfer them, but google has removed the need for this.

Ok, so its time to have a look at this Web Store everyone has been talking about. I loaded it up a little blind, I had no idea were to start, so I downloaded sky drive (so I could access Microsoft Office's online app's) a few games (angry birds and need for speed reviews to come) and Pixl (a web app alternative to photoshop, review to come.)

Physically the computer is great! its only 2.1cm think it has a nice 14 inch screen the keyboard is good. The track pad it the only let down so far the texture isn't as smooth as I'm used to but I'm sure ill adjust.

I haven't had a chance to push it to its Intel Celeron 847 with Intel HD Graphics (1.1 GHz, 2 MB cache, 2 cores)  to the limits yet, but with 4gb of RAM I'm sure it will handle anything the chrome OS throws at it. I will keep you up to date throughout the next week as often as possible as well as some reviews of apps and options the OS.