HP’s new Chromebase AiO has a display that rotates from portrait to panorama

HP has simply introduced three new Chrome OS-focused merchandise: a removable pill, a brand new all-in-one, and a Works With Chromebook-certified monitor. All of them are designed to capitalize on the explosive development Chrome OS units have seen over the previous yr and a half, as many college students and households have needed to undertake distant education. I’ve had an opportunity to check out a pre-production model of the brand new Chromebase AiO forward of the announcement, learn on for some first impressions.

The Chromebase AiO is the primary all-in-one Chrome OS desktop with the flexibility to rotate its display from panorama to portrait. You can change modes with only a mild push on the nook — the content material on the display will routinely rotate to match the brand new orientation for you.

HP claims this makes the Chromebase extra versatile and simpler to make use of for scrolling by way of lengthy webpages or working with lengthy paperwork. But in apply, I didn’t discover the portrait mode very useful in my day-to-day work.

For starters, every time I rotated the display from panorama to portrait or vice versa, my window association would get misplaced, forcing me to reset every little thing. It may be nice if all you utilize is a single window, however the 21.5-inch display is massive sufficient to ask you to open a number of home windows for side-by-side comparisons or simply higher multitasking. This clearly works finest when the display is in panorama mode, however everytime you change to portrait and again once more, you’ll should rearrange your whole open home windows. The 16:9 facet ratio is ok when the display is in panorama, however turns into awkwardly tall and lengthy in portrait mode.

Additionally, the built-in webcam is on the lengthy fringe of the display, making it most helpful in panorama mode. When the display is rotated to portrait, the digital camera is awkwardly off to the aspect. (It’s successfully the other of the issue with the webcam placement on the iPad Pro.) A portrait orientation display will be very helpful as a secondary show, however it doesn’t make as a lot sense to me for a main one.

Though the marquee characteristic didn’t win me over, the remainder of the Chromebase’s design is kind of good. The base is wrapped in enticing cloth, the twin audio system kick out a shocking quantity of sound and are clear when used for video calls. The normal design is trendy, but understated sufficient to slot in most dwelling decors. This isn’t a vivid yellow iMac, which might be an excellent factor.

The display itself is vivid sufficient for indoor use and is ok for typical productiveness or college work, even when its 1080p decision isn’t probably the most pixel dense. The contact response is appropriate and a pleasant factor to have if a youthful scholar is utilizing the pc.

The mannequin I’ve been in a position to check out is the mid-tier model with a tenth Gen Core i3 processor and 4GB of RAM. As this can be a pre-production mannequin, I haven’t executed any formal benchmarking, however typically utilization the processor is greater than as much as the duty of working Chrome OS at this decision, even when I’ve a number of desktops, home windows, and tabs going on the identical time. (The solely actual sluggishness I observed was once I tried to play 4K YouTube movies.) The RAM, however, was an unsurprising bottleneck: I ceaselessly had tabs or home windows reload within the background, inflicting me to overlook issues like e-mail notifications or lose my place in a paused YouTube video. Just 4GB of RAM may be satisfactory on a small pill the place you might be seemingly solely working with one window at a time, however on a tool with a big display that invitations you to multitask, it’s not sufficient. The top-spec configuration comes with 16GB of RAM, however I’m unsure why HP isn’t providing one with 8GB, which is sufficient for most individuals and doesn’t have the constraints of 4GB.

All of the ports on the Chromebase AiO are neatly organized in a vertical column on the again of the pc and ought to be a lot for most individuals. There are two USB-C ports rated at 10Gbps and two USB-A ports rated at 5Gbps and all of them can be utilized to cost cell units. The solely inconvenient a part of this design is the three.5mm headphone jack, which requires reaching across the again of the show to make use of.

The included wi-fi keyboard and mouse are easy, however largely nice. They run on AAA batteries and join by way of Bluetooth. The keyboard is plasticky, however nice sufficient to kind on, whereas the scroll wheel and buttons on the mouse are stiffer than I’d like. Sadly, there’s no biometric authentication on the Chromebase AiO, requiring me to kind in a PIN or password to log in every time.

HP says the pricing for the Chromebase AiO begins at $599.99, which might be for the mannequin with the lower-tier Pentium Gold chip and slower eMMC storage. The firm didn’t have pricing data for the spec tier I used to be in a position to check, however the top-tier mannequin with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage will promote for $770. If you’re prepared to spend that a lot, the Chromebase AiO may be an fascinating desktop to contemplate, offered Chrome OS meets your whole computing wants.

Photography by Dan Seifert / The Verge