Review on 💻 Samsung XE500C13-K03US Chromebook 3 - 11.6 HD - Celeron N3060 - 4GB - 16GB SSD: Sleek and Powerful Chromebook for Productive Computing by Edward Noble

I've been using this Chromebook for a month now and I want to share my first impressions of it. I won't do a technical review, you can find some on the internet. Rather, I want to share my experience of using Chrome OS on this seemingly underperforming laptop. I first bought this car for my nine year old son who will use it mainly for school. He had a tablet and he broke it. I stumbled across these inexpensive machines while looking for a new one and thought I should give them a try. I bought one with 4GB of RAM (for more room to multitask) and 32GB of storage in case I need to install it on the internal storage. I was lucky to make such a decision as this model got the Google Play Store. It was available in the beta channel when I bought it, but this month it became available in the stable channel. Having Android is a huge plus as there are far fewer apps (these are actually Chrome extensions) on the Chrome Web Store. The catch is that the Android operating system does not yet allow you to install applications from unknown sources, as well as applications on external storage. That leaves you with around 20GB if you buy the 32GB variant. But maybe that's not a problem for most people. Since I have a huge collection of movies for my kids on the NAS, one of the first things I did was find an extension called "Google File Sharing for Chrome OS" which basically lets you map a network drive to the file manager of can assign to Chrome. After using it for a few weeks, I conclude that it is faulty. It's so slow that folders take forever to load, and the file manager can't load image thumbnails. I don't think this is a wifi issue as I also have a windows laptop and can boot mounted shared folders with no problem. Anyway, I managed to stream movies by installing VLC for Android. I still haven't found a gallery app that lets me view images from a network share. Sure, Chromebooks are meant to be used in the cloud, but it would be nice to have access to network shares. This laptop is great for using the Google suite of apps, so it'll be useful for adults too if you're comfortable with Google. programs. Videos on Youtube load almost instantly with no noticeable buffering. Streaming apps like Netflix or Spotify also work flawlessly. I was even able to stream modern video games into CB from my slot machine with Nvidia Gamestream enabled and the Moonlight Android app. Most were playable. I've tried GTA V, Hitman Absolution, Far Cry IV, Rocket League, Disney Infinity, Mark of the Ninja and more. First I tried with a Wi-Fi N router and it froze. I then tried using a 5Ghz AC router and it worked much better and video games could be played. Wonderful! One thing about Android support. You should consider buying a CB with a touchscreen if you want to take advantage of the vast collection of apps that the Play Store has to offer. This laptop does not have a touchscreen, which is a limitation for gaming, for example. If you're considering buying a CB for a child, I highly recommend getting a foldable touchscreen laptop like the Acer R11, which is inexpensive and has similar specs. If you don't play games, I don't think the touchscreen is that important. Other issues I encountered were some difficulties pairing Bluetooth headphones. Sometimes they are recognized quickly, but other times I had to turn them off and on again for CB to recognize and connect to them. Battery life is around 9 hours in my experience, but I honestly haven't done a proper battery drain test so it's hard to say if it hits the advertised 11 hours. Either way, you can count on it to last all day. This is a small laptop, very light but the size of the screen makes it usable. Overall I think this is a good laptop for basic tasks and entertainment. And with the addition of Android, it's become even more attractive. I'm not giving it five stars because of the buggy network share app and the inability to install apps from unknown sources and install apps on external storage, but for the money it's a great little machine.