Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Samsung Chromebook 3: Cheaper, more productive alternative to a tablet

Samsung's latest Chromebook – the Series 3 XE303C12-A01US – is small, slim, and speedy. This little laptop weighs less than 2.5 pounds and packs a decent performance punch, assuming you're comparing it to the right machines.

## A laptop-shaped improvement to a tablet or smartphone

![](http://images.techhive.com/images/article/2013/03/google_chrome_logo-100027949-medium.png)Google The Samsung Series 3 runs the browser-based Chrome operating system. The Samsung Series 3 looks like a laptop, but it's not. It's equipped with a mobile processor and very little internal storage, and it runs the browser-based Chrome operating system instead of the Apple Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows platform. It performs more like a tablet or advanced smartphone than an ultraportable. If you're looking to do much more than surf the web and create cloud-based content (via Google or another service), then this is not the laptop for you. But if you're looking for a tablet with much better content-creation functionality--namely, an integrated keyboard--then the Samsung Chromebook is an appealing option.

Our review model, which costs $249.99 as configured, sports a 1.7GHz [Samsung Exynos 5](http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/Exynos/products5dual.html) dual-core ARM processor, which is the same mobile system-on-a-chip found in the [Google Nexus 10](http://www.techhive.com/article/2013567/review-googles-nexus-10-is-the-android-tablet-weve-always-wanted-almost.html) tablet. Like the Nexus 10, the Chromebook pairs the Exynos 5 with 2GB of memory and 16GB of hard drive space.

The Chromebook also sports built-in Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, two USB ports (one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0), a 3-in-1 card reader, and a headphone/microphone combination port. There's also an HDMI-out port on the back of the machine. Samsung offers USB dongles for VGA-out and Ethernet (sold separately).

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URL: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2019245/samsung-chromebook-3-cheaper-more-productive-alternative-to-a-tablet.html#tk.rss_all

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