HP’s new Chromebook 14 is a slim laptop, with a colorful “Sky Blue” on the outside, with light blue interior accents and a white top and keyboard. On the outside, it is packed with the usual Chromebook features, with the price also falling in the same price range of other budget-minded lines of Chromebooks. It is set to retail at $319.99 CAD. HP is also launching the Chromebook 14 G4, designed specifically for small businesses. It offers additional security layers, console-based management, enhanced virtualization and VPN connectivity for workplaces and classrooms. The G4 is verified for Citrix Receiver 1.8 on Chrome, which will allow secure access to apps, remote desktops, and data securely. Additionally, the G4 features up to 32 GB of internal storage and the G4 model will sell for $369.99 CAD.
Chromebooks have been around for quite some time, and were slow to gain an early acceptance, but all of that changed when Google started pushing them to educators. With a simple, yet elegant design, as well as being much cheaper than laptops, school systems are jumping on them. Many school districts are required to provide every student with a laptop of some sort, so saving $150 or more per student is a big deal when it comes to their budgets. This has helped the Chromebook to become the most popular education computers.
The HP Chromebook 14 has a 14-inch diagonal HD BrightView LED-backlit display with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. An Intel Celeron N2840 processor with 2GB of DDR3 RAM and a 16GB of flash storage provides the brains and memory for the device. It has one USB 3.0 port, two USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, a headphone/mic jack and a microSD card reader. When you purchase an HP Chromebook 14, you will also receive 100GB of free Google Drive storage and three Google Play movie rentals – just to let you ‘break-in’ your new Chromebook.
While Chromebooks are not setup to do resource intensive activities, like video editing or gaming – they just do not have the hardware power – they are ideal for web browsing, working with Google Docs or for watching a video. For the price, they are hard to beat.