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If you’re an 80’s kid like me, you may have memories of a desktop PC strategically placed in your home for all the family to use. Whether doing school work, playing Tetris, or chatting on message boards, the home PC became a staple for many households in the late eighties and early nineties. These days, a good portion of consumers own or use a laptop or tablet as their primary device but a desktop PC still has a lot of redeeming qualities if you have the space for it in your home or office.
ChromeOS desktops are few and far between with the majority of models coming in the form of Chromeboxes that are geared more toward enterprise applications. All-in-one ChromeOS devices are even rarer with the only current models being offered by Acer and HP. The Acer Chromebase is sold almost exclusively to enterprise customers but HP’s unique all-in-one offers a unique “twist” on the Chromebase form factor and it’s a perfect desktop device for a variety of home and office applications.
The HP Chromebase features a 21.5″ touch-enabled display which is unique enough on its own but this all-in-one also has the one-of-a-kind ability to rotate its screen 90 degrees. This creates a vertical display that’s great for all sorts of productivity applications. Using an external display, you can set up the Chromebase to have a secondary horizontal display while using the Chromebase as a vertical screen. This is great for stuff like coding, music composition, and anything else that’s more user-friendly in a vertical format. It’s also great for mobile-centric games like Temple Run which are designed for a vertically positioned screen.
Another great feature of the HP Chromebase is its ability to be upgraded. All of the internals are housed inside the conical base and can be removed as one piece from the bottom of the base. You can easily upgrade the RAM and storage to get some extra horsepower and storage space which is generally more cost-effective when you do it yourself. Oh yeah. The dual-speaker setup is also inside the fabric-covered base and I can tell you that they sound really good. You can easily sit and binge some Netflix on this device without the need for adding external speakers.
HP offers two configurations of the Chromebase 22. The Core i3 offers up a little more oomph but the base Pentium model has more than enough horsepower for moderate tasks around the home or at the office. Whether you’re a student, a cloud-centric employee or just a web-surfing aficionado, the Pentium version of the HP Chromebase will serve you well. The Pentium, 4GB/64GB model normally retails for $589 but Staples and Office Depot have slashed the price of this rotating Chromebase down to a mere $399. For that price, you’d be hard-pressed to find an all-in-one desktop that offers this much versatility in a beautiful package. You can easily upgrade to more RAM and storage for under $50 and you’ve got a formidable desktop PC that will last you for years to come.
