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While many of the specifications we've mentioned are great in theory, a lot of the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook's success relies on the new and improved Chrome OS. The revamp includes a more desktop-like experience, with icons for your favourite apps displayed on a desktop wallpaper of your choosing.
It looks good and works well at helping users from traditional operating systems acclimatise to the Chromebook's way of doing things.
As you'd expect from a Chromebook running a light operating system from a speedy solid state drive, the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook XE550C22 boots up in a matter of seconds, and after logging in you can dive straight into browsing the internet. The boosted hardware inside this Chromebook gives it a much sprightlier and smoother feel as you're browsing the web and running apps.
However, we still experienced playback problems when running high definition video, both from a USB stick and streaming it online. While a Chromebook isn't ever going to be an all singing, all dancing media machine, it's disheartening to see a product this new - and at this price (£379 in the UK or $499.99 in the US for the Wi-Fi-only model, or £429/$549.99 for the 3G version) - struggling with 1080p video.
Apart from that, things have certainly been tightened up. When we used the first generation of Chromebooks we were dismayed at the lack of support for certain file types. Not knowing if your Chromebook was able to open or play a file resulted in an extremely hit and miss, not to mention frustrating, experience.
Added support for most of the popular formats is a very welcome addition, and makes the Chromebook far more enjoyable to use.
Battery life is pretty decent, with about six hours of heavy use, although considering the specs we were hoping for quite a bit longer. It's slim, light, (25.5mm thick and 1.4kg) and looks great though, so you'd have no problem taking it around with you.
