Stefan Mileschin

The visit to Toshiba’s booth at CES was interesting for a number of reasons, and their upcoming lineup is a good indication of how polarized the PC and tablet industry has become in terms of price targets and the resulting quality. At the budget end of the spectrum, Toshiba has a new 13.3” Chromebook coming out, and makes a point of this being the first ever 13.3” Chromebook on the market. While technically true, I’m not sure it really matters that much when 11.6” and 14” Chromebooks are available, but if you wanted something in between you can now turn to Toshiba. Priced at $280, the Toshiba Chromebook comes with a Haswell Celeron 2955U processor – the same CPU as Acer’s 11.6” C720 Chromebook. It also comes with 2GB RAM and 16GB eMMC storage, weighs 3.3 pounds, measures 0.8” thick, and boasts battery life of up to 9 hours. The specs are all reasonable, but build quality definitely tends towards the flimsy plastic end of the spectrum, and when Acer’s C720 delivers otherwise similar specs outside of the LCD size for $200, spending $80 more for a larger chassis may be a tough sell. It’s not a bad product per se, but overall I prefer the feel of the Acer C720.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7705/t...abook-ces-2014