Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had an older Chromebook and the new Samsung 550 is much much better. It is fast, simple and surprisingly powerful. As long as you're comfortable with the Google Apps products (great word processor and spreadsheet, adequate presentation editor and capable of reading all Microsoft Office attachments) this is a perfect laptop for casual use. The concept of everything in the cloud works great, and makes it easy to upload, view and share pictures from your camera, do your email and social networking, and do your day-to-day document editing all from one place, then pick it up and continue on a different computer if needed. Google video chat or hangouts are better than Skype, and accommodates video conferencing with multiple parties, so ideal for families. This will save me a ton of time acting as tech support for my parents and sister, because there is so little to know to get this laptop working. I find it interesting to read reviews about how you can get a more powerful Windows laptop for the same price. To those reviewers: you're missing the point. This laptop has none of the crud that is windows (with its slow boot, patches, updates and virus checkers) and simply works. Of course, if you are into gaming, or want to do video editing you need something bigger - but that is not the target audience for the Chromebook. For casual use (and that encompasses the majority of what most people do on a laptop) the Chromebook is perfect.