Samsung Chromebook series 5 review

Although you can’t install applications like you can if you were using Windows, Google’s Chrome web store has a range of extensions that can offer similar functionality. Some of the most useful are the Tweetdeck Twitter client and ScratchPad, a note-taking tool. This lets you write quick messages without navigating away from your current tab, which are then synced automatically to your Google Docs account. Unfortunately, the majority of the web store is made up of simple shortcuts that don’t add any extra functionality.

Some things are impossible to run using a web page, but thankfully Chrome OS includes several small apps that handle multimedia playback and exploring portable devices connected to the multi-format card reader or two USB ports.

A basic file browser is opened with the Control + M keyboard shortcut, letting you view the contents of an attached memory card or USB stick, but its functionality is highly limited. You can’t drag and drop files, folders don’t update automatically – you have to navigate away from them first – and the number of recognised file types is very small. A pop-out multimedia player can handle MP3, WMA, WAV and M4a audio files, but again functionality is limited; there is no repeat or shuffle button, equalizer settings or a graphical visualizer. Support for video files was even worse, as with the exception of MP4, all our test files failed to play.

Putting our grievances with Chrome OS to one side, we were quite impressed with the Series 5’s hardware. We had no problems running several Chrome instances at once, each with several open tabs, on the Series 5, thanks to the 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Atom processor and 2GB of RAM. We weren’t able to run our usual multimedia benchmarks, but the web-based SunSpider Javascript test produced slightly quicker results than a Windows-based netbook running similar hardware. There was also no way to run our usual battery life benchmark, but the Series 5 managed a fantastic eleven and a half hours when we played MP3 files on a constant loop. We did this with WiFi enabled, as Chrome OS is useless without an internet connection.