HP Enters Chromebook Market With Pavilion 14

Today, HP expanded its line of laptops to include its first notebook running on Google’s Chrome operating system, the Pavilion 14 Chromebook.

Available now, the Pavilion 14 has a 14-inch, 1,366 by 768-pixel display, which HP boasts is wider than any other Chromebook on the market today. The Samsung Chromebook and Acer C7 both have 11.6-inch screens, but they also cost less, at $249 and $199, respectively. The Pavilion 14 is priced at $330.

The Chromebook is powered by a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron processor and features a 16 gigabyte solid-state drive and 2GB of RAM (expandable up to 4GB). With the purchase of the Pavilion 14, customers also get 100GB of free storage on Google Drive for two years.

The unit weighs just under four pounds and comes with three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, Ethernet jack and media-card reader. Battery life is rated at four hours and 15 minutes.

While Lenovo’s Chromebook, the ThinkPad X131e, is aimed primarily at the education market, HP sees the Pavilion 14 as more of a companion device to your main computer, providing easy access to Google’s various services like Gmail and YouTube.

Samsung and Acer also designed their Chromebooks as second computers, and their affordable price tags made them a more attractive option. It remains to be seen whether consumers are willing to spend a little more for the Pavilion 14’s larger screen.