Our Goldilocks-esque quest for the "perfect" Chromebook continues.

The Chromebook we want balances price, performance, and build quality without requiring you to make a major sacrifice in any particular area. The Chromebooks we've actually gotten have never quite made it there. You can get one with a nice screen and keyboard but a painfully slow processor; a whole bunch of them between $200 and $300 that have acceptable performance and build quality use poor screens; and one with a great screen and impeccable build quality that was a bad deal even two years ago when it was brand new. There are many, many acceptable Chromebooks, but we're still waiting for one that checks all the boxes for between $300 and $400—it's the same situation on the Windows side of the PC market. There are great PCs and cheap PCs, but few great cheap PCs.

Specs at a glance: Toshiba Chromebook 2 SCREEN 1920×1080 at 13.3" (166PPI) OS Chrome OS CPU 2.16GHz (2.58Ghz Turbo) dual-core Intel Celeron N2840 RAM 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 GPU Intel HD Graphics HDD 16GB eMMC NETWORKING 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 PORTS 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, HDMI, SD card reader, headphone jack SIZE 12.6 x 8.4 x 0.76" (320mm x 213.4mm x 19.3mm) WEIGHT 2.95 lbs (1.33kg) BATTERY 3-cell 44Wh Li-polymer WARRANTY 1 year STARTING PRICE $249.99 PRICE AS REVIEWED $329.99 OTHER PERKS HD Webcam, Kensington lock slot, 100GB of Google Drive storage for two years

Toshiba's 13.3-inch Chromebook 2 caught our attention not because of the $250 base model, a run-of-the-mill 1366×768 Intel Celeron Chromebook floating in a vast sea of 1366×768 Intel Celeron Chromebooks, but because of the higher-end $330 model. Not only does it double the base system's RAM to 4GB, but it includes a 1080p IPS display that addresses the biggest problem with the vast majority of Chromebooks on the market. Is this the midrange Chromebook we've always wanted, or is it another near-miss?

Look, feel, and screen

These particular Chromebooks start at $250, so you'll need to calibrate your expectations of its build quality. The Chromebook 2 is all-plastic throughout, and while it doesn't feel egregiously bad there's quite a bit of bending and flexing. The lid is generally more flexible than the base, but even the band will flex a bit if you push on it. This is typical of many budget laptops—while some of them have sturdier plastic bodies than others, few of them feel truly solid (HP's Stream is one recent exception).

The materials used in both the Chromebook 2 and Toshiba's first Chromebook are substantially similar. The lid and bottom of the laptop are covered with a hard bumpy sort of plastic, and the lid and base on the inside are covered with a smoother matte finish. Most of this plastic has a silver finish that tries to simulate metal. It's not going to fool anyone, but it looks OK.

The biggest change to the body of the laptop compared to Toshiba's first Chromebook is that it's thinner and lighter and that it lacks a fan, all byproducts of the Chromebook 2's switch from Haswell-based Celerons to Bay Trail Celerons. The laptop is down to 2.95 pounds from the original Chromebooks 3.3 pounds, and is 0.76 inches thick instead of 0.8 inches. The move to Bay Trail has implications for performance, which we've looked at before and will revisit again later on, but it's easy to get used to the total silence of a fanless system with no moving parts.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

The keyboard and trackpad in the Chromebook 2 are average-to-above-average for a laptop in this price range. The keyboard is the typical island-style affair with all of the standard Chrome OS navigation buttons instead of traditional function keys. The Search button, as usual, can be remapped to Caps Lock in the Settings if you want, and the left ctrl and alt keys are elongated to fill the space that fn and Windows keys would take up on a standard PC keyboard.

The layout and key spacing here are both pretty good, but key travel is shallow and unsatisfying. Occasionally, individual keys had trouble recognizing input, something we'd attribute to the shallow travel. The spacebar was the worst culprit, and you'll want to make sure you're pressing it with purpose. We had no problems with the trackpad, though—while it is a bit rougher than we'd like, clicking, tapping, dragging, and scrolling all worked without issue every time.

Wired and wireless connectivity options include two USB ports (one 2.0, one 3.0), a full-size SD card slot, a full-size HDMI port, a headphone jack, and a combo 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 adapter (Intel's ubiquitous 7260). The HD webcam is fine for video chatting but isn’t anything particularly special, but the Skullcandy-branded speakers located underneath the keyboard are surprisingly good. The sound is a little canned and you’ll deal with a hint of distortion if you max out the volume, but the things get nice and loud and there’s actually some audible bass.

So far all of this stuff is pretty par for the course for a Chromebook, and the base $250 model with the low-quality 1366×768 panel is going to struggle to stand out from competing offerings. The $330 model is more expensive, but much more interesting. For one, you jump from 2GB to 4GB of RAM, which we'd recommend for all but the lightest Chromebook users. For another, you step up to a gorgeous 1080p IPS display that would look great in a laptop two or three times the price.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

It's not a touch panel or anything, but it's a fairly bright display (341 nits maximum, by our colorimeter's reckoning, which is a full nit more than Toshiba's promised 340 nits) that has great viewing angles and nice-looking colors and contrast. It's a big improvement over the washed-out, bluish TN panels that ship with the lower-end Chromebook 2 and the vast majority of other Chromebooks, even though at 166PPI it's not quite a "Retina"-level display.

1080p at 13.3 inches may make things just a little small for some eyes, but hitting ctrl-plus in the browser window will zoom things in for you. As of this writing there doesn't appear to be any way to enforce an OS-wide scaling level, though, so for individual apps not running in a traditional Chrome window you still may not be able to change the size of things.

The screen in the higher-end Chromebook 2 makes the laptop more costly, but it's also the strongest point in its favor. If you can forgive the laptop's other foibles, this is the reason to buy it. Now, let's talk about the biggest reasons to look elsewhere.