Toshiba Chromebook CB30-102 review

LONG LIVE THE CHROMEBOOK
With its battery-friendly Haswell processor, the CB30-102’s battery life is seriously impressive. In our constant video playback battery test, Toshiba’s machine lasted an impressive seven hours and 13 minutes, which is 11 minutes longer than the Acer C720, our previous record holder. With light usage, we’d expect the device to last a whole working day while on the move, although we’d recommend bringing the charger along just in case.

With Chromebooks, software is as important as the hardware. Long gone are the days when Chrome OS was a glorified web browser rendered impotent without an internet connection. The combination of increasingly common free WiFi combined with Chrome OS’s improving offline app support means you’ll rarely find a situation where the Toshiba CB30-102 is completely useless. It would sometimes take a while for a document on the CB30-102’s SSD to synchronise with the cloud, but we never lost documents.

We’re not terribly impressed with the apps in the Chrome Store, and many of the available games are rehashed Flash games of varying quality. For more serious business, Google’s Drive and Docs apps should more than meet your basic needs. An array of add-ons is also available from the store for more advanced tasks such as document signing and image editing, but these vary in quality and you may need to pay for them.

If you want to use your Chromebook fully, you’ll need to embrace cloud software and cloud storage very quickly, and commit fully to both its benefits and shortcomings. This should be helped by the two years of free 100GB Google Drive storage which comes bundled with the device.

CONCLUSION

The Toshiba CB30-102 ranks among the best-value mid-size laptops on the market. It’s more powerful and cheaper than the 14-inch HP Pavilion Chromebook while offering much better battery life. Things are less clear-cut when compared with the benchmark-setting Acer C720, though. The Acer C720 is cheaper and has marginally better performance, but the CB30-102 has a larger screen. If you want a great value Chromebook with a fairly large screen, the Toshiba Chromebook CB30-102 is the one to buy.