The chromebook was packaged neatly and was quick to get up and running once unboxed. It comes with a 45W USB-C charger. I tried my phone’s charger (10W) and it actually worked. Slow, but it worked. So, if you’ve got your phone charger and forget the chromebook’s, all is not lost! It has a regular USB port, the USB-C charging port, and audio jack on the right side of chromebook, a USB-C port (which can also be used for charging), micro sd slot, power and volume buttons on the left. They keyboard also has keys to control brightness, volume (including mute), lock, browser forward/back, android forward back, full-screen toggle, and button to toggle all the open apps. The screen is pretty nice though when watching 1080p content, the lack of additional pixel density makes the screen not look as nice as something with similar pixel count but on a smaller screen. I suppose that’s a tradeoff though being a chromebook, one may not have too much in the way of customizing the DPI with which things are rendered as you would on a typical OS. The speakers are good. The grills open out the bottom of the chromebook which seems strange. Volume wise, I was pleased in a quiet environment. A slightly noisy one really drowns out the speakers, even at full volume. It’s really strange how that seemed to work. The keyboard size and spacing is a bit weird given that you have the chassis of a 15” laptop. There’s a decent amount of bezel so the yoga is plenty wide. The keyboard itself is narrow which makes for a smaller typing area than you’d expect. Furthermore, the keys themselves are on the small side which leads to above average mistakes, especially when keys at the first and last couple columns are involved. The keyboard is also not backlit which mostly isn’t an issue but is annoying if you’re ever typing in the dark. Build quality is pretty good with no flex in the base. The screen didn’t feel as strong and the force threshold I was comfortable applying was much less. Still, the weight distribution is pretty good and when propped on a lap or bed, only starts to topple if the screen angle is toward a particular extreme. The chromebook can be used in tent mode. Essentially, you flip the screen all the way to the other side. This disables the keyboard and puts in in touch only mode. This also flips the screen orientation, though still in landscape, so that you can let the screen and base make a tent to prop up the chromebook. Given how well it plays back video, this can be a pretty useful mode, especially while traveling. Screen orientation can be manually controlled via settings so one can set it to a portrait orientation The chromebook is capable of running android apps. My usual daily apps all have web applications so I mostly didn’t bother. Where having Android will come in handy is to replace things that you’d normally install via a desktop app on a laptop - dropbox for example. While I’m sure, many chromebook users are fully integrated into the google ecosystem, having the ability to make use of alternatives is nice. For me, the chromebook is a strong contender to replace my current laptop with one major weakness - it’s not powerful enough for my engineering work. While remote desktop could solve that, there are enough times that I need to completely work locally or without a VPN connection that that chromebook simply can’t be a complete replacement. I also have some desktop apps (crypto wallet for example) for which there simply isn’t a Android version. To that end, I’ll still need a home machine. Using remote desktop with a headless machine at home to get around these two issues is tempting. Now, I really need to consider just how often I travel and need to work without internet access. Printing worked though setup had a bit of a hiccup. I was able to add the printer both to the chromebook and to google cloud print. The cloud print setup had me confirm the setting on the printer itself. But after that, nothing printed, either via the direct printer setting in the chromebook, google cloud print, or my tablet/laptop which had been previously setup and has printed many times before. After rebooting my printer, everyone was happy and I got three copies of the same document. Battery life is pretty nice. I didn’t perform a true run-down test, but the battery life I got was easily 3X my current tablet/laptop. Given that most of my use at home is not work related, this is a pretty significant improvement. My 8.4 inch android tablet usually handles weekend browsing and reading. With a 12 hour battery life, it’s good for a typical weekend’s use, especially when paired with my normal phone use and the times I want to hop on my current tablet/laptop for the more “desktop” experience. The chromebook’s longevity makes it a strong contender to completely replace the 8.4” tablet and laptop over a weekend and only requiring me to connect the charger at the end of a day. While it can’t replace the 8.4” for mobile gaming, the weight and ease of use make it compelling for almost everything else that I used the android tablet to accomplish. I’ve already complained about the keyboard input. Touch is nice and works well. I need to look into changing the default touch screen keyboard - it doesn’t feel optimized for such a large screen, but otherwise it is adequate. I wish I could use the on-screen keyboard without being in tent mode - perhaps there’s a setting for that but it’s not immediately obvious. I was pleased with the performance of the chromebook under light to medium web browsing loads. With the Core i5 processor, it feels much more fluid and responsive than the Core i7 in my desktop OS running tablet/laptop. However, with a heavy tab load, the chromebook quickly bogs down where the other machine would slow, but still keep up. While I’m sure that the i5 in this chromebook is more geared towards power efficiency, this is still a bit disappointing. This situation doesn’t necessarily occur that often for me as I typically keep things down to around 10 tabs or less, when I’m researching something or comparing various options, the amount of tabs I open can skyrocket and being able to switch between them easily to compare and contrast is important. Overall, I think this is solidly three stars and stretching towards 4. Perhaps 3.5 stars is a better indicator of where this belongs. There are some issues, none are deal breakers, but the combination does make the chromebook a compromise, regardless of the promise contained.