hey everybody it’s lionside then we’ve got another chromebook to take a look at today it’s the hp chromebook x360 14c and this is a two in one so you can flip the screen around here and have it work in display mode or you can turn it into a tablet if you want and of course you can use it just as a laptop if you choose and we’re going to be taking a closer look at this chromebook and what makes it tick here in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this is on loan from hp so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this chromebook is all about now the review loaner that we have here has an i3 10110u processor that’s a 10th generation intel chip it’s a dual core processor 8 gigabytes of ram 64 gigabytes of storage and wi-fi six all of the models have a 1080p 14 inch touch display here that is because these are convertibles and can turn into a tablet if you want so really nice display here good viewing angles on it it’s ips the brightness is
about 250 knits or so so not the brightest display but for its price point i think it’s certainly adequate colors are good it is a very nice looking display very easy to read text and look at photos and that sort of thing and 1080p on a 14 inch display here looks really good there are prior models of this laptop this one has the same size display but in a smaller frame because they made the bezels here thinner and that allowed them to make a more compact package so it’s a really nice feeling system overall the weight on this one is 3.64 pounds or 1.65 kilograms it’s a little on the heavier side but that’s typically what we see on one of these 14 inch devices battery life is pretty good though we’re seeing about 10 to 12 hours if you keep the brightness at a moderate setting and you’re not pushing the system all that hard and it used to be a very general statement to make about battery life on chromebooks because they didn’t run all that much stuff now you can do a lot of different things with the chromebook so your mileage is going to vary based on what you’re doing with it but if you’re just sticking to the basics like web browsing and email i think it’s definitely doable to get 10 to 12 on this one if you’re running android games you’re doing a lot of stuff on the linux side of things that of course will eat into the battery life a little bit more build quality feels really nice on this a nice stiff hinge which will keep the display in place wherever you leave it so that’s been pretty good it also has a magnet here to grip it all together when you put it back down you do need to give it a little bit of effort though to get the lid back open here because it does like to stick there so it will pick up the keyboard here as
you go so you just have to hold down the keyboard deck and lift up the display it’s got aluminum on the keyboard deck along with the top of the display lid here as well but it’s plastic on the bottom you have a fingerprint reader now which we’ll demo in a few minutes for getting into your account a little bit quicker so that’s pretty nice a really good keyboard here this one is backlit and that’s an option so the lower end model likely won’t have the backlit keyboard but most of the other models do and the same can be said about the fingerprint reader which is an option on some but not all of these devices the only sour point i have is the track pad it feels a little slippery and i did find myself turning down the sensitivity in the settings a little bit to make it a little easier to control and i think that’s more of a software tweak that they can make down the road with updates and stuff so i think that can get rectified i also like the fact that it’s got upward firing speakers because if you are using this most of the time as a laptop you’ll have very consistent sound a lot of machines like this often have downward firing speakers which will sound different depending on what surface they’re on this one’s pretty consistent the only problem though is that if you put it into display mode those speakers become downward firing speakers so you might want to look at hooking up some headphones or going with bluetooth audio or that sort of thing now there are a number of ports on this laptop so let’s take a look at my overhead view starting with the right side of the unit you’ve got your micro sd card slot here which you can use to augment its onboard storage so if you want to carry some movies or music around with you put them on the sd card and it will sit flush to the unit and give you a little more storage beyond what came with your device the maximum internal storage you can get on this is 128 gigabytes and again this one’s got 64.
so putting one of those cards in there will give you a good boost in storage space over here you’ve got a headphone microphone jack there’s a usb type-c port here that’s a full service port so you can charge the laptop through this port and you’ve got a power adapter included of course to do that but you can also send video out to an external display with a usbc to hdmi adapter for example it’ll work with displayport adapters as well and of course you can plug usb data devices into that port too so nice to have a full service port there next to it is a usb a slot and this looks a little different than your typical usb port because the laptop is so thin so when you plug in a usb device you just move this little door down a little bit to accommodate the larger plug so we’ll stick down just a little bit there but you can have a thin laptop and a full-size usb port here with this one by the way this is not a fanless device there is an intake here which will exhaust through the back you’ll want to keep that clear but the fan doesn’t come on all that often and when it is on it’s very very quiet so it’s a pretty silent laptop but you definitely want to keep this off of carpet or other things that might block that airflow now on the other side here we’ve got another usb type-c port you can charge on this one too so you can plug the power adapter into either one and like the other usbc port this is a full service port so you can do data and video through that one too power button here you’ve got a volume rocker there and this is your webcam privacy switch here which you can use to turn the camera off with just a flick of the switch and right now it’s in i believe the off position with that red thing there so right now nobody can see the camera but i’m going to flick it back on here because i want to demo the webcam let’s take a look at that now the webcam on this is 720p nothing spectacular but it’s decent enough for conference calls and that sort of thing and then of course you’ve got the privacy switch here so if we enable that it makes the camera dark it basically turns off the video note though that your audio still carries through when you have that feature enabled so just be aware of that your microphone is still active but your camera is off and if you want to have some assurance of privacy leaving that switch in the off position all the time might be the best way to go you’ll also see the light at the top here will change color so if you turn it back on here
and the camera is active it’ll be white and when the privacy is enabled it switches over to orange now we did test this with zoom and google me and it all worked just fine it should work with just about any other conferencing provider out there as well some conferencing providers might have you download their android app which will run on this others will just have you use the conferencing software inside of the web browser so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting onto meetings for work or school with one of these now we’re going to dive into its performance in just a second but i did want to touch on the fingerprint sensor here pardon the pun because this is kind of a new thing to chrome os now what you can’t do with this is at the moment at least log into your account you’re still going to need your password to log in but if you lock the screen you can now unlock it without having to use your password let me show you how this works so right now i’m logged into my account and let’s say i want to lock the screen maybe i walked away or shut the screen or whatever and i’m to my lockout menu here normally i’d have to type the password in now i can just rest my finger on the fingerprint sensor here and it will put me back in but this will not let you switch to another user and then switch back with the fingerprints so there are some things still that will require the password entry but it’s nice to see that if you are frequently locking and unlocking your chromebook you can use the fingerprint sensor here to quickly get back in this is pen compatible we’re not going to be looking at pen support today because we don’t have a compatible pen to use with this but the universal stylus
initiative pens or usi will work with this and they do have a magnet on the side of the laptop that you can use to hold the pen in place as well when you’re walking around and we’ve demoed pen support and some other videos we’ve done about chrome os it’s getting there and they do have some cool note-taking applications you can use with the pen but it’s not as complete as what you might find on other operating systems all right so let’s take a look now and see how this performs remember we’ve got an intel i3 chip on board here so it’s going to give us a good amount of zippiness we’re on my ac wireless network right now we’re just popping into the nasa.gov homepage i can use my finger here of course to scroll the screen and if you’ve got it in tablet mode you can flip the screen orientation all together it feels really snappy here as i would expect it to feel for the price point so no issues there and we also loaded up youtube with my 1080p 60 video here and all seems to be doing pretty well i did have one drop frame when it got started but it seems like it’s been able to keep up with everything just fine so you shouldn’t have any problems watching youtube or any other video service on the device here it seems to keep up with just about any video that we threw at it and on the browserbench.
org speedometer test which is a benchmark test we use to measure how well laptops do on the web we got a great score here of 199 on version 1.0 of that test and 122 on version 2.0 and that is very close to what we’ve seen with some other more powerful laptops out there running with i7 processors now those more powerful computers will do better in other areas like gaming or other things that really stress the processor in different ways but for the most part for web browsing you’ll have a very smooth snappy
experience on here like you would on other higher powered windows laptops now one of the cool things about chromebooks is that they now run android apps and you can install those apps through the google play store and this is the same google play store you might have seen on your phone or tablet so if you purchased an app on your phone there’s a good chance that it might work here on your chromebook so if you go into your past purchases you might see a lot of stuff that you’ve already purchased and a lot of the games that you might want to play here like one of my favorites pac-man 256 will work just fine in fact you can use the touchscreen and even run it in tablet mode and get a huge 14 inch display in which to play so a lot of this stuff is going to work fine you will find though that some apps are not compatible with the chromebook and the reason likely will be the fact that this is running with an intel processor whereas a lot of phones and tablets are running with arm chips so some things just won’t be there but a lot will and just a matter of playing around and seeing what might be available on the app store now one thing to keep in mind though is that netflix will perform better on the browser than it will through the netflix app so it’ll let you go in here and install the netflix app in fact i’ve got it running right now but it doesn’t run at a drm level that allows for hd video so what will happen here through the netflix app on android running on the chromebook it’s only going to give you standard definition or 480p but you’ll get better quality video if you log into netflix through the chrome browser so my rule of thumb especially with video apps is go in through the browser first because you’ll likely get better performance but if you want to do things like download video for offline viewing through netflix or amazon
prime for example then install the app for that just know that you’re not going to get hd quality video for the offline viewing so one of the cool things about chromebooks is that most of them now can run linux and this one does a nice job of doing that given it’s got the intel processor inside you enable this in your system settings and once it is enabled you get presented with a command line prompt here that you can use to run software and install all sorts of apps so you got your standard command line based stuff and if you really want to start learning linux in a way that you can’t break anything a chromebook is a great way to experiment because it’s all containerized it’s separated from the rest of the system you really can’t break the chromebook by experimenting with linux and if you happen to break your linux installation like i did once or twice before you can just delete it and start over again and it’ll put you right back where you left off they now have a nice backup feature so you can back up your linux install before you make major changes to it and roll back if you need to there’s a lot of cool stuff that they’ve been working on here with the linux system and the other neat thing about it is that if you install an app that uses graphical elements here like the libre office suite you get those apps running natively on the chromebook even when you’re offline so if you don’t want to use google docs for example you can install the libreoffice writer here and other open source applications that might be similar you can also do spreadsheets and all sorts of other things as well with a familiar interface and what’s nice is that all of this is running locally and all the files are saved and stored locally as well so it’s a really good platform for experimenting
with open source software and if you haven’t tried this yet on your chromebook definitely give it a shot now one advantage of having an intel processor is that you can install steam on the linux installation on your chromebook and then any linux compatible games in your library you can download and run just remember that we don’t have a terribly powerful system here so things like shovel knight which we were playing a little bit earlier ran great but other games that require a discrete gpu and other more powerful hardware components of course will not run as well and at the moment i don’t believe it supports game controllers through usb i know they’re trying to add usb support for the linux side of the system here so that’ll come in the near future but it is pretty cool to be able to install steam on a chromebook and run and load games up natively that you have in your library but i have had good luck running game streaming services and apps on chromebooks right now we’re connected to geforce now which lets you stream some of your steam games over the internet through their servers and this works through a web rtc app so it runs natively on the chrome web browser and i’m able to connect up my bluetooth game controllers with it this works pretty nicely google stadia works really nicely with these as well and then for in-home game streaming i found that the rainway app works really nicely too because it also works through the browser but we did test out steam link via its android app and that one worked okay as well so there are some good options here for streaming games and if you’ve got a decent wi-fi signal here you should have a pretty good experience overall now all
chromebooks come with an end of support date where they will no longer receive any software or security updates the date on this one is june of 2028 so at the time i’m recording this video it’s just under eight years which is a good length of time they’ve been extending these dates out further and further as new models come out which is good because initially the support dates were not all that long now they’re getting longer here on the newer models but just be aware that if you’re watching this video in 2025 and looking at buying this used you’re only going to get about two and a half or three years of updates before it will stop getting any support it’ll still work it just won’t get anything new delivered down to it over the google software updater but all together i think it’s a great chromebook it’s got a decent performance for the price point everything that we were throwing at it like the linux applications were working very quickly without any real lag or delay i was very pleased with its performance even on basic web browsing as well and i think altogether it’s a good value for someone looking for a mid-range chromebook that’s going to do it for now let me know what you thought down in the comments below and until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters tom albrecht chris allegretta mike patterson and bill pomerantz if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
