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The Samsung Chromebook is a perfect example of the difference between inexpensive and cheap. At $250, it is in impulse-purchase territory. But unlike the Acer C7, nothing about it feels cheap. It feels, as the Verge’s Chris Ziegler described it, like “$1,000 worth of design made with $100 worth of materials.”
See our Law Technology Buyer's Guide for our top technology recommendations.
The Acer C7 Chromebook is one thing: cheap. The price tag is low, but so is the quality of the components, the way they are put together, and the user experience overall.
If the price tag is more important to you than things like speed, battery life, and durability, maybe the Acer C7 is for you. If you think a Chromebook ought to be quick, with great battery life — and affordable — then look elsewhere.
See our Law Technology Buyer's Guide for our top technology recommendations.
The idea of doing all your computing in a browser, from answering email to drafting briefs and contracts, is pretty hard to conceive for many lawyers, most of whom are still perfectly happy with their fax machines and file cabinets (not that there is anything wrong with that). But that is probably what you will be doing in a few years, and the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is a window into that future.
What’s more, the Samsung Chromebook is a really nice ultraportable laptop, even if it won’t (yet) replace a computer (laptop or not) running a full-blown operating system like Windows, OS X, or even Linux. If you want a Chromebook, though, you should probably wait until later this year, when Samsung plans to release an updated version. In the meantime, you may be wondering whether the Chromebook is yet another toy you don’t need, and whether you could actually get real lawyer work done on one.
It’s not a toy, and doing everything in a web browser is far less difficult than you might think. Whether you ought to—and whether you will be doing your clients a disservice by trying—is a separate question.
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