HP Chromebook 11

If you think the concept of Chromebooks is pointless or if you think they won't last long, boy are you wrong, twice. While it may have it's shot comings, this little slice of heaven is for those who want to be productive but without breaking the bank. This is my review of the HP Chromebook 11.

So this is the HP Chromebook 11.  This Chromebook was made by HP and Google, so you will see HP build with Google style and flare. I spent about a week with this machine, everyday and every night. This chronicles my week with the HP Chromebook 11. When you first get this, it comes in a nice size brown box. Once you open it, you are welcomed with a bright white case with a blue wrapped paper down the center (I think the wrapped paper goes with the color of your Chromebook. Mine is the white and blue model). On the inside of that is a nicely placed Chromebook and charger and Chromebook information. The presentation is very nice and clean. It makes you feel as if your getting something in high end but for a fraction of the cost. 

After you take out the Chromebook from the box, you are going  to want to plug your charger to it. Side note. The charger is your standard everyday micro USB charger. So that means that one charger can charge your Chromebook, your smartphone and anything else that uses a micro USB charging port (and there are a ton of them). So no more carrying like nine chargers for various items you carry. Alright, so back to the Chromebook. Once you charge it up, it seriously is three simple steps to get you right on the internet and surfing the web. After you put in your WiFi information (oh by the way, this is WiFi only and a lot of things can't be done on this Chromebook without the internet, but more on that later) you are greeted with an update that will be downloaded to your Chromebook.

I know I said it was three easy steps, but this is the longest of them. It says the wait is about five minutes but it was slightly longer than that. But it was not a big deal, just find yourself something else to do for about ten to fifteen minutes, just to be safe. Once you return to your Chromebook, you will need to sign in with your Google information or if you don't have any, I believe you can create one right then and there. After that, your welcomed to your new Chromebook. The specs for the device are here, just scroll to the bottom.

these are some of the offline apps like gmail, kindle, and docs

Once you are on your way, the Chromebook acts just like a real laptop, but with a slight twist, there is nothing to do with Windows or Mac on this Chromebook. So if you get this expecting to be able to use your same Windows 7/8 settings or things here or Mac OSX with Mavericks, think again because this is all Google services. That is not really a bad thing if you are deep into Google's offerings like with their Android Smartphone OS. Most of the things you find on your smartphone that have to do with Google, you will find here. One of the biggest complaints people have with the point of a Chromebook is that it only works while online. While that may be true, there are new offerings all the time in the Chrome App Store for applications to work offline. Honestly, today there are a ton of places out there that offer free WiFi and rather your in a big city or a little one, most fast food places have it and so tons of coffee shops. A lot of people like to do their work outside of the office and house anyway, so this may be something that fits right up their alley. So what do you do first? Well first off you want to go and take advantage of Google Music's 60 days free of all access and then the 100 GB of free Google Drive Cloud Storage for 2 years which is also free. Which is awesome. Just about 90% of my photos and home movies are in Google Drive. So when the 2 years are up, its only like $5 a month after that and Google has some crazy cloud storage space; like up to 16 TB (yes terabyte) of space for $799 a month. So you get an idea of how important storage is to them.

After you do that, and actually takes less time than the software update, you just go and do the normal things you do when you surf the web. You can still download pictures to you Chromebook. Run out of space? Attach a flash drive to a portable hard drive to it. It will run things off of it or save them to it. But the thing they really want you to do, is to use that cloud storage. So Google Drive is a Chromebooks best friend. There is a file system on a Chromebook and that's another thing I like (first thing was the price). And that is basically the run down for this Chromebook. Now on to how I use it and the likes and dis likes.

This is where this Chromebook becomes hit and miss. Any and everything you have or tend to have will have its goods and bad's and this is no different. This however is what are you willing to deal with on a day to day basis. For me, I actually like this Chromebook. It has a little style and flare and it actually feels really solid. I am a fan of chicklet type keyboards, and while this is not it, it does make the noise's that I like when I type because I like to know (hear) how much work I am doing (its just one of those things). What stinks, is this touch pad! The screen is bright, but you get the idea it could be brighter and it looks weird in the day time. Did I mention this touch pad stinks!! It stinks because the touch pad is emotional, its way to sensitive. The finger and swipe gestures are almost pointless. And this is where that "what you are willing to deal with" kicks in because, while you can plug in a mouse, how often do to you want to keep attaching it to your Chromebook, and if you use a Bluetooth mouse, that will help drain your battery just a bit more.

got it to play .mkv but no sound

a little bit of sound for you all

You have to also know coming in what this machine is capable of doing and not doing. You have to know that when you video chat through Google Hangouts (yes people no Skype or Face Time here), you just have to be aware that the camera in this machine is really, really poor. Like it's VGA poor. Like VGA in a dark room and can not sense the light poor. The rest of the design is great. I like the white with the blue accent and blue foot prints at the bottom. My favorite color is red, but when I get Android things or Chrome things, I like to get blue or blue cases and things like that.What is also nice about this model is that there are four other colors: white with red, white with green, white with yellow, and an all black model. If you understand what this machine is for, then I believe you will like it, maybe not love it, but like it for sure. There is no USB 3.0 on here, just 2 USB 2.0 ports on here. The machine plays movies (in .avi format not so much, but .mkv i got working but with no sound) in .mp4 and plays music without a hitch. Good thing I have music in my Play Music Storage so I just basically ran music from there and let the WiFi do all the heavy lifting. Also, The sound is built right under the keyboard and it sounds great, nice and loud. Other than the charging port (which you can use your cell phones charger) and the headphone jack and 2 USB ports on the side, that is all the connections you get and they are all on the left side of the machine.The right, front and the back, nothing.

In the end, this machine is not for me, however it might be for you and here is why. If my school used any other format than Microsoft Word, this machine would be a steal. Seriously. I find that when I do school work in Google Docs, its fine it looks great and all that but, when I save it as a word document and then view it in Word, the formatting is off just enough to make me lose points every week and that's just dumb. I could just edit it in Word and whatnot, but then that's just to much extra work and not everyone has the time for that. The point of this machine is to make it convenient for you to be productive and not counter productive. So because of that, I will have to pass and that IS the only reason. I guess I could deal with the track pad and the screen brightness and again those are nit pick items. The HP Chromebook 11 is really a nice computer. If your in school, this is perfect for it. If your a photographer or a musician, this is not for you unless you just want to view your work on the go or via USB, but then if that is the case you could just use a iPad or a another tablet, you actually can do more with those, in my honest opinion (or a regular laptop). But for $279.99 and the biggest thing here is school or second/third computer for your house or the kids (flash games like Y8.com and clubpenguin.com, seem to work well) than this thing is right up everyone's alley. If you just want to checkout your email or surf the web or do some shopping on Amazon or eBay or even write a review like I did here through Google's services, than it's great for that as well. Anything else, please look elsewhere and don't be upset if you get one and then complain about what it can't do.

HP Chromebook 11 is something I would recommend to others

Comming Soon: review of AOC i2367Fh full HD 23" LED monitor; The Fusion Tournement Controller for PS3; The iPhone 5s; and more

I am also going to revisit some great PS3 memories as we get ready for the PS4 this November.

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this is fast it loads up from sleep

NBA 2K14

On Monday night I was able to download the greatest basketball sim to grace any systems console. That is right, NBA 2K14 was installing and I just couldn't wait to play it. Did it live up to expectations? This is NBA 2k14.

Let me just say that, the game looks the exact same! That could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you want to look at it. I thought 2k13 looked good but its like it didn't look as good as 2k12. But My eyes got used to looking at 2k13 and so it became the standard. So when 2K14 comes along, I thought it may look at least a little different, but as soon as I seen it, I just kind of shook my head. But so far that is the only (real big bad) bad that I have against the game....so far. There are other small gripes and complaints but for the most part, its the way it looks. There is one thing to keep in mind, this game will also be on PS4 and Xbox 1, so you can take the way it looks as maybe they will make the next gen consoles versions look bad ass instead of porting over this version. 

With that out of the way, now on to the good. The game may look the same, but it sure doesn't play the same. A lot of the animations are smooth (maybe to smooth) and that is such a good thing. I play the my player part a lot or as its called my career. Last years game used to piss me off so bad with the animations making me suck in to another player on rebounds or free throw attempts. I hated it. This year so far I can see that there is no suction. The thing that I did notice is that everyone plays excellent defence, even if the other player sucks at defence. You can take that for what it worth but I will save you the trouble and let you know that it was sarcasm. I guess where one thing is worked on, other things lack. But it is still not a killer for the game. So far out of the modes that I have played, exhibition and my career, I like it. I don't love it, but I do like it and I see myself going beyond the basketball season again playing 2K14 (I played 2K13 until GTA V came out). The game itself is not a big download, just in case you want to download it. Its about 8874 MB or as it said 8.7 GB. 

So when you first play the game, first thing you should do is, forget that you know how to play 2K13. Seriously, they changed the button layout for most things and it was a little weird getting used to, but by the 2nd quarter I was good to go. The right analog stick is now the cross over stick and the shooting stick. You could use it as that last year by holding the L2 trigger, but now if you hold that and hit the right stick, you throw a flashy pass or the Steve Nash/ Ricky Rubio passes. Hold the right stick in any direction makes you shoot. Holding down R2 and holding right analog up makes you dunk, R2 and right analog right makes you do a James Harden like layup, while down is a floater and left is a swing layup. It takes some getting used to if you use analogs to play, but you can still shoot with square and pass with X. Posting up is still the same, but its like posting up now actually works and the game lets you try to workout. Circle now is used to call for picks. You must notice that pick and roll is now the second option whereas last year it was the third option as you held it down. Dunk animations are just about the same, but with a few new dunks sprinkled in and now some of them look a lot more vicious. The blocking is a lot more beautiful. The arm actually swings as you try to block it. I had one of my shots chased down and blocked from behind in my game and it looked so great. All in all the game play is so much better than last year and that is such a plus. 

The soundtrack is much better. No dis to Jay-Z and his choices for last years game, but that soundtrack sucked to me. At least this year it is more diverse (well not really but its still better than last years). On of the things that I did like was that they added new shoes to the mix. Peak has been added in and I think another one. The shoe selection is a little small compared to last year but with updates I know they will fill out like last years shoe roster did. The one think I don't like about 2K, and this goes for 2K13 and 14, they skipped out on the details, the little details. I am a person that likes all the small things in a game rather the big things. Case in point is the shoes. For making the shoes, all this did was flip the design on the opposite foot. So instead of a Nike sign going the right way on the tongue of the shoe or the heel, it goes in the opposite direction and it looks odd. The crowd still looks terrible. People on the sideline still have cut throats. There are a few other little things that I don't like but to me its all in the details. 

The draft part of the game is hilarious. Why? Because they added audio from the actual draft. It seems like it would be sweet and when I first heard them call Anthony Bennett for the Cavs, I said hey that's how he sounded during the draft and then I heard the disbelief in the crowd and I just said to myself, that's cool, they added audio from the draft. However, my appreciation for that small detail was short lived and it seems later in the draft, they got lazy and the editing was terrible. Then it just kind of threw that all out the window. There is new dialogue for the my career mode and it seems like now your player says what you actually want them to say. I told the GM during an interview after the rookie game that I did not want to play SG. Because of that, I didn't get picked by that team and that kind of sucked cause I wanted to play for them but not at SG. The draft is still stupid. I got picked 11th to the 76ers where someone else got picked, but when the season started there he and I was, same draft number and everything. The little things. 

The game itself again overall is good though. I will play this just about everyday and I haven't gone online yet, but I am sure the servers stick like always with 2K basketball games. On a side note, it is almost time for me to retire getting games for the PS3. I know I said it before, but GTA V was to awesome to pass up and I am really considering getting this Beyond 2 Souls. I have a demo for that game (which I will delete tonight) and I have to say if you like Last of Us or Heavy Rain, this game will blow you away. The demo is really awesome and that might be my last game for the PS3 and because I am running out of room.

I have a lot of games on my PS3 and only one of them is a demo which is Beyond 2 Souls

So if you are interested download the demo and the game comes out next week on the 8th of October. As for NBA 2K14, I don't know if my game scales up to be apart of that promotion when you you get a PS4, but if I have to buy it again at full retail price, then I will. NBA 2K13 I bought twice for the PS3, once for the Xbox 360 and once for the Wii U. So buying this an extra time is not really a big deal, but if I can upgrade it to the PS4 for $10 like you can Assassin's Creed 4 or Battlefield 4 then I am really all over it. But NBA 2K14 is a great buy if your a basketball fan, and I think I would rate it a 8.5 out of 10. 

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