Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9190/the-dell-chromebook-11-touch-review



In my view, Chromebooks have gone hand in hand with tablets in eating away the part of the market that was once filled with low quality and low cost netbooks. I think that both tablets and Chromebooks offer a consumer a much better experience than netbooks ever did with their slow hard drives, extremely low resolutions, and inadequate hardware. Personally, I think tablets have a bit of an edge over Chromebooks due to their app ecosystems and typically better quality displays, but both stand above where the netbook was.

The Chromebook is an interesting device though, because I think it's something that both laptop and tablet buyers may consider as an alternative. While the Chromebook was originally criticized by many due to its limited functionality, the capabilities of Google's web apps have increased significantly since that time. Google's online product offerings like Chrome, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive can satisfy the needs of many users, and this has driven growth in the consumer, education, and business sectors alike. The availability of Chromebooks from many different vendors has also contributed to their quick adoption.

One of the manufacturers that has begun to dabble in Chromebooks is Dell, and today's review takes a look at their newest Chromebook. It's the Dell Chromebook 11 Touch. More accurately, it may be called the New Dell Chromebook 11 Touch or the Dell Chromebook 11 (2015) as Dell had offered a previous generation of Chromebooks which were also called the Dell Chromebook 11. This new Chromebook from Dell appears to target a different section of the market than its predecessor, as it sports a new rugged design to protect it from accidents and environmental hazards that it may endure.

Dell Chromebook 11 Touch (2015)
Processor Intel Celeron N2840
Dual-core 2.16-2.58GHz
HD Graphics 4 EU GPU
Connectivity 2x2 dual-band 802.11ac (Intel 7260NGW)
Bluetooth 4.0 (Intel 7260NGW)
Memory 2G or 4GB DDR3L
Storage 16GB eMMC
Battery 3-cell 43Wh
I/O 1 x USB 3.0
1 x USB 2.0
HD webcam
Dual array microphone
HDMI
Headphone/mic jack
SD Card reader
Dimensions 11.69" x 8.57" x 0.83" / 297 x 217.7 x 21 mm
Display 11.6" 1366x768 TN LCD with optional capacitive touch
Weight 2.74 lbs. / 1245g (non-touch)
2.91 lbs. / 1320g (touch)
Price $249/$269 for 2GB/4GB non-touch, $329 for 4GB touch

At $329 most of these specifications are fairly standard for a Chromebook. In fact, you may notice that they are nearly identical to those of Toshiba's Chromebook 2. Apart from some differences in size and mass, and a 1Wh difference in battery capacity, the internal specifications and ports are the same on both Chromebooks. There are two key differences between the two which will likely be the deciding factor for a potential buyer. The first is the rugged build of the Dell, which compares to the more standard tapered plastic shell of the Toshiba. The second is the display, with the Dell Chromebook 11's 1366x768 TN LCD not looking near as appealing on paper as Toshiba's well calibrated 1920x1080 IPS LCD, but including touchscreen functionality. We'll be looking at both of these differences over the course of this review, and they're both important to keep in mind if you're trying to make a decision on what Chromebook to buy.

Design

From this point onward in the review, I'm just going to refer to this laptop as the Dell Chromebook 11 without the word touch on the end. This model is the version with the touch display, but all of my impressions that are unrelated to the touchscreen will also apply to the non-touch model and I don't think it's worth explicitly stating that this is the touch model when it's not necessary. It should also be noted that the non-touch version comes in both 2 and 4 gigabyte RAM configurations for $249 and $269 respectively.

A big part of the Dell Chromebook 11's design is its ruggedness. Dell is touting their MIL-STD testing which means that its durability has been tested against various levels of pressure, temperature, humidity, shocks and vibrations to meet a standard created by the U.S. Department of Defense. For consumers, this basically means that it should survive being knocked against things, having fluids spilled on the keyboard and trackpad, and other forms of daily abuse that other laptops may not stand up to.

While I didn't test its resistance to accidental spills, I did treat the laptop less carefully than I do with my other devices to see how well it would hold up. The rubberized coating that surrounds the edges of the display and all the ports was able to withstand my abuse. Based on that and how the chassis feels, I would say that the Dell Chromebook 11 is good for anyone who works in industries like construction, or who just tends to put their devices through a lot of hardship.

Another interesting design choice on the Dell Chromebook 11 is the cyclindrical hinge which allows the display to be opened up to 180 degrees. This actually has significant implications for durability, as it greatly reduces the risk of the hinge developing weakness or the display being snapped off of the rest of the body due to some force pushing it beyond its maximum angle. From my conversations with teachers at schools that have deployed Chromebooks, damage to them by students often occurs due to some accident or mistreatment causing the hinge to snap. The hinge also serves as the home for a pair of stereo speakers.

Overall I think the Dell Chromebook 11 looks fairly good for a rugged laptop. I'm fairly careful with my devices, and so I lean more toward more traditional plastic or metal designs without additional layers of material to increase durability. That being said, Dell has done a fairly good job of making their Chromebook aesthetically presentable while also making it durable. It's definitely not the most beautiful laptop out there, but its appearance suits its function well, and inspires confidence that it will be able to withstand the types of accidents that would put a large dent in my MacBook.

Other Impressions

Often many parts of a laptop experience are fairly subjective. For example, the feel of a keyboard or a trackpad. Other parts like audio quality can be objectively measured, but I simply lack the equipment to do so. Below you'll find some of my thoughts on these parts of the Dell Chromebook 11, as I think they're important even though they don't fit anywhere else in the review.

The first thing I wanted to discuss is Dell's keyboard. I was actually quite surprised by how nice it feels to type on. The travel distance and amount of force required to press down on the key is similar to that of my MacBook Pro with Retina Display and the Chromebook Pixel. The keys also actually seem less wobbly than my MacBook, and there's a comfortable amount of space between them. The key caps also seem to have a similar soft touch finish to the chassis itself. I'm not sure that I'm a fan of it, but that may just be due to all my other laptops and keyboards using a more glossy plastic finish on the keys which I have become used to.

The next thing to talk about is the trackpad. Unfortunately, this is where things fall apart when it comes to input methods. The tracking itself is normally okay, with no massive amounts of latency. I still feel that while Chrome OS has better default acceleration curves for trackpads than Windows, that it's still not as good as what you get on OS X. The big problem with the trackpad is that the cursor tends to jump around, which makes the act of clicking on a small object or trying to make a small cursor movement extremely frustrating.

The touchscreen in the third method of input on the Dell Chromebook 11. I actually found myself using it more often than I did on the Chromebook Pixel, but this is mostly because of the Dell Chromebook 11's less than optimal trackpad being annoying to use. However, touchscreens are still not extremely useful in Chrome OS, and I don't really think it's worth the $50 price premium that you have to pay compared to the non-touch model.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is the speaker quality. They sound slightly muffled, but they're not that bad as far as laptop speakers go. Having them facing toward you is also much nicer than many other laptops of this size which tend to put them on the sides, or even worse, on the bottom.



Display

Chromebooks are typically aimed at buyers with a small budget, and many of the early generations used the same 1366x768 TN displays that were offered in low end Windows laptops. However, the advancement of display quality on both laptops and tablets has made the prospect of a high resolution IPS panel in an inexpensive device a reality. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 is an example of this, with a well calibrated 1080p IPS display in a $329 package.

Unfortunately, in order to implement their durable design and protection from spills, dust, and other hazards, Dell has had to take a step down with the display quality relative to other Chromebooks at the same price point. The Dell Chromebook 11 uses an 11.6" 1366x768 TN display. While the use of a lower resolution TN panel may be disappointing, it's still possible to have good brightness, contrast, and color reproduction on a TN display. To evaluate display attributes beyond the resolution, we use X-Rite's i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer and SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software.

Display Brightness - White Level

Display Brightness - Black Level

Display Contrast Ratio

CalMAN - White Point Average

Unfortunately the Dell Chromebook 11 doesn't get off to a great start. Peak brightness is nothing spectacular, and it can be difficult to use the display outside or in an environment with heavy lighting due to the reflections on the glass. Black levels are far too bright at 0.61 nits, and this leads to a very low contrast ratio of 441:1. In addition, the display has an average white point of 12410, which makes it one of the bluest displays we've ever tested. This can be seen in more detail in the greyscale error results later on.

CalMAN - Gamut Average dE 2000

The display does exceptionally poorly when it comes to gamut accuracy. You can still get a deltaE around five even if you have a narrow gamut that covers around 60% of sRGB. It's clear that the backlighting in the Dell Chromebook 11 is very poor, as it misses even the green primary in addition to all the other primary and secondary colors. 

CalMAN - Saturations Average dE 2000

Saturations are all over the place with the Dell Chromebook 11's display. Many of the colors do not even follow a linear progression of saturations and instead tend toward another color as the saturation increases. Due to the gamut accuracy, 100% blue ends up falling outside of the sRGB gamut entirely.

CalMAN - Grayscale Average dE 2000

Going forward in 2015 I've decided to start putting CalMAN's color comparator back into reviews. This was used in a few reviews from the distant past, most of which were part of our laptop coverage. I think it's a good tool to give a visual representation of what a deltaE value actually means, as the degree of error for a given deltaE can be abstract and hard to visualize. It's important to note that this image only shows the relative error between the target and measured results, as any errors in your own display will cause errors in the target shades displayed on the bottom half of the bars in the image.

With a greyscale deltaE of over ten, the Dell Chromebook 11 is wildly inaccurate when displaying any shade of grey that isn't essentially pure black. With a lack of red and surplus of blue components of luminance, there's a heavy blue tint to essentially every shade of grey. Gamma is also too high, but would be surprisingly accurate if one was targeting a gamma of 2.4.

CalMAN - Gretag Macbeth Average dE 2000

The colorchecker test has an error of similar magnitude to that of the greyscale test. The deltaE is approaching ten, and every color is rendered completely incorrectly. Both the inaccurate greyscale and the display's narrow native gamut also contribute to this. Because of the gamut, many of the color mixtures of high saturation are rendered as much duller and less saturated colors.

I'm honestly very disappointed with the Dell Chromebook 11's display. I had thought the industry had moved past TN displays, with even the $99 HP Stream 7 sporting an IPS panel. With poor viewing angles, a low resolution of 1366x768, and poor color reproduction, the display on the Dell Chromebook 11 really has no redeeming values. It's especially disappointing when compared to the equivalently priced Toshiba Chromebook 2 which does very well in all of our tests and has a much higher resolution of 1920x1080 on a slightly larger 13.3" panel. Display quality was definitely put on the chopping block in order to allow for the Dell's rugged construction, but even if you require the rugged build it's still hard to argue that the compromise is worth it.



Web Performance

Due to the limitations of Chrome OS, we're mostly limited to browser benchmarks to characterize performance. It's a similar situation to mobile benchmarking, which I commonly describe as less than optimal. However, since essentially everything a user will do on a Chrome OS device is done through Chrome, it's actually a fairly good indication of the performance they'll see on a given device.

Like the Toshiba Chromebook 2, the Dell Chromebook 11 being reviewed uses Intel's Celeron N2840. Unlike Intel's more expensive Celeron parts which use their Haswell architecture, N2840 uses Silvermont cores much like Intel's Atom parts in the Bay Trail line. Because of this, users should expect performance closer to that of higher end ARM chips and Intel Atom SoCs than that of Intel's Haswell based Celeron parts.

SunSpider 1.0.2 (Stock Browser)

Google Octane v1 (Stock Browser)

Mozilla Kraken (Stock Browser)

WebXPRT (Stock Browser)

CrXPRT

In all of our benchmarks, the Dell Chromebook 11 gets roughly the same results as the Toshiba Chromebook 2. There are some minor differences which can be attributed to variance in scores between tests, as well as updates that have been made to Chrome OS since previous reviews. When using the Dell Chromebook 11 it never seemed to struggle, and I think that users will have all the speed they need to do their work on the web even if the CPU doesn't offer class leading performance.

WiFi Performance

Since Chromebooks are devices that are primarily used to browse the web, it's important to have good WiFi performance. Most inexpensive Chromebooks opt for 802.11n, and sometimes don't even include support for the 5GHz band. Because the Dell Chromebook 11 is more of a mid range Chromebook, it includes support for dual spatial stream 802.11ac which is pretty much as good as it gets for laptop WiFi, with the exception of a few 3x3 devices that are on the market.

While there's no way to test WiFi performance in Chrome OS, it can be accomplished via other means with the use of Linux and iPerf. I'm hoping to eventually bring our laptop WiFi performance test from Windows to Linux in order to get TCP results that are comparable to those in our standard laptop reviews, but for now I've just put the Dell Chromebook 11 through the UDP performance test that we use in mobile reviews.

WiFi Performance - UDP

With a maximum speed of 502Mbps, the Dell Chromebook 11 is beaten only by the Chromebook Pixel. I wish I had more Chromebook data points here, but this is a test that I introduced for our Chromebook reviews and this is only my second review of one. Regardless, I don't suspect that users will have any complaints about the WiFi performance on the Dell Chromebook 11.



Battery Life

Battery life on Chromebooks is typically very good, as they don't have much going on in the background. I would like to add some WebGL and video playback to our web browsing test in the future, but I still think it's a good representation of the amount of page loading that users do on their Chromebooks. The Dell Chromebook 11 has a 43Wh battery, which is as large as some Chromebooks with 13" displays. One would hope that this results in a substantial battery life, and indeed it does as you can see below.

Web Browsing Battery Life (WiFi)

The Dell Chromebook 11 achieves the highest score on record in our web browsing battery test. At 13.13 hours it pulls ahead of the Chromebook Pixel which I had previously praised for its stellar battery life. A more relevant comparison at this price point is Toshiba's Chromebook 2, which trails the Dell Chromebook 11 by over six hours in this test. The display in the Dell with its lower resolution and smaller gamut definitely plays no small part in this, but for someone concerned primarily with battery life the Dell Chromebook 11 looks like the Chromebook to buy.

Video Playback Battery Life H.264

While tablets and smartphones tend to achieve longer battery life in our video playback test than our web test, the situation is reversed for Chromebooks. Given that many Chromebooks take advantage of dynamic backlighting and contrast like tablets do, I suspect that the issue comes down to software optimizations. Even so, at 8.03 hours the Dell Chromebook 11's battery life during video playback is still pretty good, and again is ahead of the Toshiba Chromebook 2.

Charge Time

Long charge times have never been much of an issue for laptops, as they've never been limited by many standards for how high the wattage on their chargers can be. Unfortunately the charge time test is another test that I've introduced for our Chromebook reviews, and so the Chromebook Pixel ends up being the only other Chromebook data point. The rest of the results in our chart are for Windows laptops. However, the time to charge for a device is really independent of the operating system, and I'll be adding more Chromebooks to this chart as time goes on.

Battery Charge Time

Dell includes a 65W AC adapter to charge the Chromebook 11's battery, and to charge from a completely empty state to 100% takes around 2.3 hours. It's not as fast as the Chromebook Pixel's charge time, but it's slightly quicker than most of the Windows laptops on the chart.



Final Words

As far as Chromebooks go, I think the Dell Chromebook 11 is one of the better devices you can buy without spending $1000 on a Chromebook Pixel. While Intel's Celeron N2840 is more like an Atom chip, it's still perfectly sufficient for the tasks that users will perform on a Chromebook. You can certainly drop even lower in price, with Chromebooks available for $149 and even $99, but you end up making even more hardware sacrifices which significantly compromise the user experience.

Dell has definitely accomplished what they set out to do with the Dell Chromebook 11. It's more than fast enough to run Chrome OS, has an ample amount of RAM to keep your tabs open, and it has the best web browsing battery life of all the Chromebooks and tablets that we've ever tested. It's also very durable and well constructed. While the design isn't exactly stunning, it avoids looking like a bulky brick laptop that you would bring to use in a war zone.

Unfortunately, the Dell Chromebook 11 with the touchscreen faces some serious competition from Toshiba's Chromebook 2. Both of them have roughly the same internal specifications, but the Toshiba has a display that is vastly superior in every respect, without the not very useful touchscreen capabilities. Dell's pursuit of a touchscreen and a highly durable design have forced them to cut costs with the display quality in order to reach their price of $329. For your average user, I really have to give the Toshiba the recommendation over the Dell Chromebook 11 at that price point, as the higher resolution display makes everything sharper and allows much more to be seen on screen than a cramped 1366x768 display. While the Toshiba's battery life is significantly shorter due to the increased display power usage, I still think it's the better option.

Despite my feeling that the Toshiba Chromebook 2 is a better purchase for most users, the Dell Chromebook 11 doesn't lack appeal to certain segments of the market. One of the markets that I believe it will be widely adopted in will be education. While I feared that schools and other academic institutions would simply opt for the most inexpensive Chromebooks possible for budget related reasons, some investigation of the local high school in my area revealed that they already have a large number of Dell Chromebook 11 units in use. Some students don't tend to take care of electronic devices that don't belong to them, and the Dell Chromebook 11 stands up to the abuse and misuse better than other devices.

The other area where the Dell Chromebook 11 will stand above the Toshiba is any environment that isn't electronics friendly. People working in construction or in geographical areas where dust and dirt are unavoidable will definitely benefit from the rugged design and MIL-STD rated resistance to fluids, dust, etc.

There is one final consideration, and that's the non-touch model of the Dell Chromebook 11. Starting at $249 for 2GB of RAM, or $269 for 4GB of RAM, both of these configurations offer a very capable Chromebook for your money. This is actually the model I saw adopted in schools, as the $50 price increase for the addition of a touchscreen is not really worth it with how limited its usefulness is in Chrome OS. Considering that other Chromebooks with similar specifications but less rugged build quality than the Dell Chromebook 11 can also cost this much, it's definitely a Chromebook that should be heavily considered at those price points.

In closing, I'll say that users who need a laptop with the durability of the Dell Chromebook 11 probably won't be considering other Chromebooks in the first place. I highly recommend opting for the non-touch model, as the touchscreen is not very useful and increases the cost significantly. But when considering the touchscreen model my general recommendation for a Chromebook at that price still has to go to the Toshiba Chromebook 2 because of its display. Paying the $50 extra over the base model Toshiba for the 1080p IPS panel is a much better use of your money than the $50 for a touchscreen on the Dell. At $249 or $269 for the non-touch model, I would probably still encourage users to spend the extra bit for the Toshiba. But if the rugged build is necessary, or if someone really needs to keep their budget around $250, then the Dell Chromebook 11 will be their best bet.

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