The textured finish gives it a reasonable amount of grip, but also gives the illusion that it’s more sturdy than it actually is. The physical design is an interesting mix of high end appeal and cheap components, which is to be expected given the Toshiba CB30’s low asking price. The USB ports are relatively close together which could be problematic if you’ve got bulky USB devices to plug in, but being USB 3.0 they can be quite fast with the right peripherals. In expansion terms Toshiba is relatively generous, with full SD card and kensington lock on the left, while the right side gives you two USB 3.0 ports, HDMI out and a combined audio in/out port. Not that you’re meant to store much content locally, but it’s nice to have.

The slight downside here is that its an ordinary 1366×768 pixel display, so proper HD movie viewing is out of the picture. Where other vendors have tended towards portability with 11″ displays in mind, the Toshiba Chromebook CB30 has a nice large 13.3″ display. The advantage with a small and lean internal storage system is that boot times are incredibly quick, whether from a cold start or flipping the display screen open. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but the key matter with any Chrome OS laptop is that you’re meant to store the vast majority of your content in Google’s cloud. In Toshiba’s case, they’ve matched up an Intel Celeron processor N2955U Dual Core 1.4GHz processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of onboard storage. It’s a testament to the quality of the online productivity experience that this works at all, and it does give a Chrome OS laptop some particular advantages and disadvantages. If you wanted to try the Chrome OS experience before you buy, the simplest way to do so would be to load up Google’s free Chrome browser on your Windows, Mac or Linux box, and then stay within the browser entirely.

Toshiba’s Chromebook CB30 doesn’t stray too far from the usual Chromebook design, but its size and price do just enough to make it stand out from the crowd.Īs with other Chromebooks, what you’re talking about with the Toshiba Chromebook CB30 is a laptop running Google’s Chrome browser.

Toshiba google chrome laptop