Andrew Cunningham

The Chromebit. Ours is black but it comes in silver, orange, and blue, too.

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Asus’ new Chromebit isn’t the 1st personal computer-on-an-HDMI-stick, nor is it the quickest or the most versatile. You are going to be in a position to do much more with a Windows Pc, just as a inexpensive Windows laptop can do much more stuff than a Chromebook in spite of getting similar hardware to do it with.

But ChromeOS feels like it may actually be a far better match for the sort of hardware that will match inside an HDMI dongle (at least till that beefier Core M Compute Stick from Intel comes out, assuming it doesn’t have significant hardware issues). For $ 90, Asus will sell you a full ChromeOS device operating on ARM hardware, and although neither of those two issues are going to blow anyone away, they are truly pretty effectively paired if you happen to be looking for some thing that walks the line in between Pc and appliance.

Appear and really feel

The Chromebit looks and feels nice, not that it specially matters for something that will primarily reside buried behind a Television or monitor or receiver someplace. It’s a sleek plastic tube with a bit of heft to it, and it fits in the bare minimum of ports. You have got one male HDMI connector underneath a removable cap you are going to most likely drop, a energy jack on a single side, a USB two. port on the finish for peripherals, and a safety lock slot underneath to deter theft. You don’t get a microSD card slot like the a single in Intel’s Compute Stick, which is understandable because ChromeOS relies overwhelmingly on cloud storage. But there is no microUSB port to power the device making use of a port on the back of your Television or monitor, an unfortunate omission.