Review: Asus C300M

Introduction and design

Who'd have thought it? The Chromebook is all grown-up. Early reviews of these cloud-connected lightweight laptops were a little sniffy, but the Samsung Series 3 in late 2012 silenced much of that criticism. Now a new wave of bigger, better and bolder devices are coming through – still inexpensive, still portable, but with much more power.

The Asus C300M is such a device. With its dual-core Intel N2380 CPU, it has low-end specs for a laptop but more processing power than most other Chromebooks.

It's not the first to market with more screen for your money. In fact there are devices that have broken through the 1080p display barrier. The C300M doesn't – but the design, specs, performance and price-point still make for a machine that's worth a look. But a word of warning first, you may need to put on your sunglasses...

Design

With a slim profile boasting a height of 20.3mm from lid to base, the fanless C300M has Ultrabook styling and Chromebook mobility. At 339mm wide and 230mm deep, the 13.3-inch screen is part of a trend towards larger displays. The first wave of 11.6-inch Chromebooks, like the now classic Samsung Series 3, are beginning to look like toys in comparison.

Chromebooks are usually a bit plasticky – and that's fine when you're paying £200 (around $250 in the US, in the case of this model) or thereabouts for a computer you can chuck in a rucksack. The Asus C300M just about falls into that ballpark, with a lid barely 5mm thick and a casing that's distinctly springy in places. The build is solid though, and it looks reassuringly like a standard notebook until you pick it up.

The rounded corners, common to Chromebooks, add a bit of softness to the overall design. If we were to guess the brand decisions behind it, we'd go with the student market. It's a funky rather than functional looking wrapper for a piece of kit that's good for web research, media consumption and essay writing.

What you lose in brawn you gain in portability – it weighs just 1.4kg (3.08lb). That just about enables you to carry it around open, cup of tea in one hand and Chromebook in the other.

Until recently it was en vogue to disguise the construction of Chromebooks with a grey or black finish, as though pretending to be metal or carbon would somehow atone for the reliance on synthetic polymers. Not the C300M. It's loud and proud, with off-primary finishes that include blue, yellow, red and, um, black. We road-tested the red edition which, truth be told, is a bit closer to blood orange.

It's at this point that we would be making a joke like "it's too orangey for Chrome" if we hadn't enjoyed using the C300M. But we did enjoy using it – very much. The candy coated colouring added something to that.

Specifications

As far as ports go, the C300M is better than some Chromebooks, but worse than others, with an HDMI, USB 3.0 and SD Card port down the right-hand side. There's also a dual function audio port. The USB 3.0 port isn't colour-coded, so some customers might miss it unless they read the specs. You'll find a single USB 2.0 port over on the left side.

That's, essentially, a sufficient number of USB slots for a mouse and an external drive and not much more. But this is a Chromebook, designed for portability and webby stuff – it's not really intended as a full desktop replacement.

Unlike Toshiba's higher end Chromebook 2, another 13.3-inch contender, the C300M's display doesn't go up to 1080p. If HD video's what you're after, you'll need to put up with 720p, you poor thing. The specs tell us that the C300M's native resolution is 1366 x 768 and it looks crisp and clear at that – allowing for the relatively shallow viewing angle. Dive into the display settings and you can nudge it up another notch to 1536 x 768 but, take heed, no good will come of that unless you like your text unreadably fuzzy.

Here's the exact spec sheet for the model we tested:

• CPU: 2.16GHz dual-core Intel Celeron N2830 processor


• Graphics: Intel HD Graphics


• RAM: 2GB DDR3


• Screen: 13.3-inch 16:9 HD (1366 x 768)


• Storage: 32GB SSD


• Ports: 1 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB 2.0, HDMI, SD card slot, headphone/mic jack


• Connectivity: Integrated 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0


• Camera: HD webcam


• Weight: 1.4kg (3.08lb)


• Size: 33.9 x 23.0 x 2.03 cm (W x D x H)

With a recommended UK retail price of £219 ($249 in the US), we've seen the Asus C300M going for as little as £189.99 in the UK. The Chromebook market is getting very competitive very quickly and there's little to differentiate between similarly specified models. The Toshiba CB35 Chromebook 2 with 2GB RAM, 16GB storage and a 1366 x 768 resolution display configuration retails for £189.99 in PC World and Currys too ($262 in the US) – though you do get a slightly faster CPU in the N2840.

Apart from our ongoing frustration that the difference between UK and US prices is shockingly apparent at this end of the market, just about any Chromebook can be a bargain. But specs only tell one part of the story.

Performance

We used the Asus C300M for two weeks in our work machine rotation. It went travelling with us, was whipped out on trains and sat in on meetings. It rested on our lap in the evening as we live tweeted Question Time. We used it to write approximately 15,000 words of copy, take minutes, watch Netflix and crunch data in spreadsheets.

The extra width made for a more comfortable typing experience than our usual portable machine, a Samsung Series 3 Chromebook. The familiar chiclet style keyboard is a proletarian choice, with plenty of space around the keys – but with less feedback than is ideal.

Google Apps performs, as you would expect, flawlessly. It would be a poor Chromebook that couldn't handle Google's native applications. With just 2GB of RAM on board, Chrome only slowed down with multiple instances of the browser running, each with multiple tabs open. That's Chrome for you though, every tab a separate instance staking claim to its own republic of volatile memory. The C300M felt less sluggish than our other work laptop, a Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook running Chrome on Windows 8.

Media matters

The real test for a Chromebook is streaming media use. The big, shiny sticker next to the C300M's capacious trackpad promises "high-quality audio" – when what we actually get from the system's hidden speakers is serviceable reproduction.

Playing "Dark Side of the Moon" in Spotify Premium, we were able to pick out most of the detail, cleanly rendered with stereo effects intact. There wasn't much distortion, but it was thin and focused at the treble end of the spectrum. We tried a bit of recently re-mastered Nick Drake, whose sparse acoustic fingerpicking and close mic'd vocal seemed to suit the dynamic range of the C300M's speakers. Slipknot's "Wait and Bleed" was just scream and snare, the guitars sounding like a bee trapped in a jar.

Next, we opened Amazon Instant Video for some HD streaming at 720p. The Doctor Who special "The Snowmen" played back stutter-free over our 802.11n Wi-Fi connection – but it's here that the C300M's TN LCD display began to show its weakness. We struggled to position it at a viewing angle that would allow us to enjoy the Doctor's exploits without shadow or light obscuring the screen. It was much better up close, though the picture was a little soft and lacking some vibrancy.

The final outing in the media performance tests was browser based bash-'em-up Bastion. At full resolution the C300M handled the cartoony Zelda-a-like admirably, with Chrome rarely dropping below 51 frames per second. Only in sustained combat did we see a dip down to 44 fps. For us, that says this is a finely balanced device – with some room to grow.

Battery life

With this level of hands-on performance you might expect the C300M to burn through its battery swiftly, but that seems far from the case. Asus promise us a 10 hour battery life and, while we never quite got that in real world use, it's pretty near. We recorded one stint of 9 hours 16 minutes of mixed usage, with power settings tweaked using Keep Awake to prevent the screen from going to sleep. Over our period of use, the battery calibrated to reporting 9 hours 30 minutes of juice left when full.

This is outstanding performance by any measure, but especially impressive when stacked up against other 13.3-inch Chromebooks. It's a full two hours longer than the – on paper, more powerful – Samsung Chromebook 2 (our review of this machine clocked the battery life at 7 hours 32 minutes). It beats the battery life of Toshiba's 1080p Chromebook 2 by an even larger margin.

Need a device for a long commute? If you can look past, or even love the Tonka toy aesthetics, you may well have found it...

Verdict

We probably would have preferred to try a version of the C300M with 4GB of RAM to match the 32GB SSD storage – but our overall impression was still very favourable indeed. Though a little larger than Chromebooks of old, this proved to be a mobile machine with much to recommend it.

We liked

Like the Zen masters of ancient Japan, the C300M achieves balance in most things. The dual-core N2830 combined with just 2GB of RAM was enough to keep up with 720p video, browser games and streaming audio. Corners have been cut, but they were the right ones judging from the performance we've witnessed from more power-intensive displays.

The concentration on balance translates to excellent battery performance too. When combined with heft that's just the right side of portable, the C300M shapes up as the perfect laptop for long days on the move.

We disliked

Those colours. We think Asus was going for "vibrant" and "exciting" but the decision to pitch between primary and pastel... it doesn't give a good first impression.

Then there was that TN display. Perfectly good for working and gaming, when the angle of view is right in front of you, but not so great for iPlayer, Netflix or YouTube. Of course, there's an HDMI out to plug and play media to another screen – and all is fine if you can pop the C300M on a table close by.

Final verdict

Perhaps our colour complaints are a little churlish. We learned to live with our orangey C300M, but were very glad, after checking out the other colours on offer, that we didn't get a Barbie blue or banana yellow machine delivered for review.

The important thing is the Asus C300M is a perfectly balanced device for coffee shop warriors, commuting accountants and peripatetic teachers. Chromebooks set out to give you lightweight research and office tools, with great battery life and, of course, online storage. It's more than a tablet, but less than a Windows notebook. This is a supremely well executed example of the category; one of the better mature Chromebooks we've tried.

And the price-point doesn't hurt either. Comparable to some smaller devices, you get a lot of keyboard and display for your money. It's a really top drawer, backpack laptop.

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