Laptop battery life and performance are well worth the cost: Dell Chromebook 11

One of my favorite small Chrome OS laptops is the HP Chromebook 11. The Dell Chromebook 11 is roughly the same price but may be my new favorite thanks to stellar battery life and screen that almost rivals the HP.

All of sudden, the Google Chromebook market is getting pretty crowded.  These days you can also find Chromebooks from Lenovo, HP, Acer and in the very near future, from Asus. With more Chromebook choices than ever, there are becoming fewer and fewer opportunities to differentiate between various models. Dell too is among those partnering with Google and I’ve spent the past week using a Dell Chromebook 11. The laptop is aimed at the education market, but it’s a winning device for regular Chrome OS consumers too.

Dell Chromebook 11 is well designed and well built too. Some of the budget Chromebooks currently available feel like budget Chromebooks; not so with the Dell. It feels like it should cost more: The wrist-rests have a nice soft texture, the long screen hinge swivels cleanly and instead of small rubber feet under the laptop, it has two lengthy rubber channels that hold the computer in place on a desk.

Dell opted not to use an ARM chip — typically meant to power smartphones and tablets — like HP and Samsung have done with some of their Chromebooks. Instead, this laptop uses a dual-core Intel 2955U Celeron chip running at 1.4 GHz. That gives it roughly twice the performance of today’s ARM-based Chromebooks and on par with most of the other Intel-powered ones.

Having used the Dell Chromebook 11 as a full-time computer for what I do — blogging, browsing the web, watching movies or television shows — the device works well for me. Better than the ARM-based Chromebooks I’ve used in the past and comparable to competing devices powered by Intel chips.

That shouldn’t surprise though: The Toshiba Chromebook 13 I was using prior has the same Intel Celeron processor inside. So too does the Acer C720 and most other Chromebooks announced in the past six months.  Best of all, Dell advertises Dell inspiron 1750 battery life at up to 10 hours and this laptop delivers. It surprised me after working all day on the Chromebook 11 that the battery percentage would still show at 20 to 30 percent capacity. This Chromebook runs the longest on a single charge than any other I’ve used yet; most comparable devices top out around 8.5 hours of run-time.