[Body]Just a couple of years ago a lightweight ultraportable laptop with an aluminium shell and an IPS touchscreen for less than $300 would have been unthinkable. So how about Asus Chromebook Flip priced at only $239? That’s pretty crazy, considering what you get for the money. Although, I would insist on paying extra $40 for the version with 4 GB of RAM - in the long run it’s probably even a better deal. With most of its shell made of aluminium, save for the plastic hinge, the laptop is surprisingly pleasant to hold, to carry in one hand, even simply to look at, when it rests on a coffee table. Of course, nice and pretty laptops have been around for many years, but usually they have also had unattractive or outright scary price tags. With a few mild compromises the Flip breaks this tradition, and in that sense attracts even more, quite literally - you just wanna pick it up, open and play with it. Its size might have something to do with it, there’s certainly some cuteness to the feel of a miniaturized “adult laptop” that it gives. It even manages to offer two full-sized USB 2.0 ports, a microSD slot and a micro HDMI port.[Display]In short, it’s nice. It’s bright, with good contrast and rich vivid colors, and the viewing angles are wide both horizontally and vertically. Somewhat thick bezels might be slightly disappointing for some people, but rarely to the point of being a deal breaker - after all it’s a flip screen, so using this laptop in tablet mode implies bezels wide enough to safely hold it with one hand. I’ve seen some negative comments around the web about the display resolution of the Flip, which I think is an unfair judgement. It’s 1280x800 on a 10.1” IPS touchscreen (which translates to adequate 149.5 ppi), that fully folds backwards, in a laptop that costs less than $300. There are laptops currently sold with 13” or even 15” washed out TN panels “rocking” similar 1366x768 resolution for almost twice the price of the Flip. Hell, even the current near $1K MacBook Air 11 still holds on to the same resolution. And many of them don’t offer tablet mode or even touch functionality. Besides, that little extra vertical space that you get with 800 lines against 768 lines is beneficial when it comes to web surfing. Point is - Asus Chromebook Flip offers easily one of the best displays in its class for a humble price, and only falls behind higher-end tablets. My single gripe would be about its reflectiveness (which is what you get for having a touchscreen) - not a huge deal, it’s not crazy reflective, but generally I like matte screens more. It is, of course, a matter of personal preference, and some people like glossy panels just fine.[Performance]I was skeptical about the Flip’s quad-core ARM CPU from Rockchip. While I still believe that ARM belongs in phones and tablets (at least today), I have to say that most of my concerns are gone. First of all, this thing is thin and very light, it’s fanless and absolutely silent. There are other fanless Chromebooks with Intel chips on the market, but so far none of them offer the same build quality with the Flip’s size and weight to battery life ratio, or better performance. And its performance should be perfectly sufficient for most casual users - you can breeze through daily tasks like checking email, social networks, messaging, typing documents, making video calls, listening to music, watching videos or doing basic photo editing - and that is essentially what the majority of people do on their laptops. With the 4 GB RAM version I manage to have a few Chrome apps like TweetDeck and Google Play Music running at the same time, while jumping between several tabs opened in the browser without any problems. I’ve been stress-testing this little laptop quite harshly, and made it stutter when I was intensely “travelling” through Google Maps in street view, while keeping a bunch of tabs with heavy websites open, one of which was playing a YouTube video. But after I focused on one tab and gave the laptop some time to cache everything, things were back to normal. It’s worth mentioning that the bottom side of the laptop got warmer than usual, but never reached an uncomfortable temperature. Overall the Flip demonstrates surprisingly solid performance, but, of course, you shouldn't have any unfair expectations of lightning speeds. Sometimes a poorly optimized clunky website would take few annoying seconds before it lets you scroll or click anything on the page, but a good chunk of modern web seems to be friendly to lower-end hardware these days. When it comes to video playback, the mobile-oriented Mali-T764 graphics processor handles 1080p 60 FPS videos without a problem. Not that it makes much sense to play 1080p videos on the Flip’s screen, but you do have the option to connect it to an external monitor or a TV via micro HDMI port. The combination of size, form-factor, performance, and screen quality makes the Flip a great device to enjoy Netflix, YouTube or Hulu, whether you’re behind a desk, sitting on a couch or relaxing in bed. This also makes it a better communication device than larger and heavier laptops that are mostly used on a desk. The wide angle camera makes it great for Hangouts video calls even when you hold the Flip close on your lap. It won’t shock you with the picture clarity, but your friends on the other end will see you just fine. It drops the framerate slightly in low light, as most cheaper webcams do, but it’s still usable. The microphone gets the job done when used indoors, but it might struggle picking your voice in certain noisy environments.[Keyboard]Asus Chromebook Flip is also not a bad device for casual productivity. Probably working for several hours on very large documents with a smaller than usual keyboard might not be its best use, but anything else it gets done pretty effectively. Other than its size, the keyboard feels rather balanced. The keys don’t wobble too much, they’re not too hard or too soft, and they travel fairly deep. It’s just a bit smaller than what you normally get on a 11” or 13” laptop, and unless you have very large hands, it probably won’t feel cramped. Most people don’t find it uncomfortable. It’s not backlit, so working in complete darkness is not recommended, but for the price it is expected. With a little extra care it can also be a quiet keyboard, making the Flip even more classroom-friendly or library-friendly, if you will. The trackpad, traditionally for all Chromebooks, is also pleasant to use. Of course, because of the size of the laptop, it’s smaller as well, but still very usable. In my personal experience it’s not quite as sensitive as, for example, trackpads on Toshiba Chromebooks. But that’s a mild complain, which is easy to drop remembering the trackpad is accompanied by the touchscreen. It is certainly times better than anything you’ll find on Windows laptops for a similar or even higher price, especially when it comes to multi-touch gestures, like two-finger or three-finger taps and swipes. And don’t forget there are two USB ports, if you prefer using a mouse.[Sound]The speakers are loud enough… for a tablet. As far as laptops go, all recent Chromebooks with 11,6” screens offer much louder, although not necessarily clearer sound. The Flip is great for watching or listening to something in bed at night or in a quiet room, but if you live in a city where street noise easily gets inside your home or office, you will likely be turning the volume all the way up pretty often, and sometimes still struggle to hear everything, especially when the media itself is not very loud. Fortunately, the little speakers don’t tend to cramp up and crackle when turned to the max. So they aren’t bad per se, but don’t get carried away by expectations. The Flip pleasantly surprises when you plug in headphones or an audio system of your choice - for a cheap device, it outputs pretty decent sound.[Battery]Thanks to the efficient Rockchip CPU, one of the Flip’s strongest sides is battery life. Asus officially promises 9 hours on full charge, but that’s a humble call - you can easily make it through 10+ with mild multitasking. If your workflow doesn’t consist of repetitive opening and reloading heavy websites maniacally, while playing music in the background, you might get even more out of it. Streaming TV shows and movies would typically shorten the battery life by a couple of hours, and consuming media offline would affect it even less significantly. As a matter of fact, I was watching a movie downloaded to the local storage, with Wi-Fi turned off, hooked up to the TV via HDMI (with the Flip’s screen turned off), and the OS concluded that it would run like that for 16 hours. What?!? So yeah, it’s likely you won’t need to carry the charger in your bag. Speaking of the charger, unlike a typical “brick” that come with many laptops, this one is pretty small, although it could’ve been even smaller if it had a foldable plug. Well, no biggie. It’s a 24W unit that outputs 2A and takes a bit longer to charge the Flip than other Chromebooks do with their “bricks”, but not too long, usually within 2.5 hours. It might explain why the Flip has a proprietary charging port instead of a popular micro USB (type C is out of question, since more powerful variants aren’t cheap).[Tablet mode]I would’ve liked the Flip, even if it wasn’t “a flip” and couldn’t fold its display backwards. Because it’s so light and well built, I would say it’s worth the price even as a regular laptop. And that’s how I use it most of the time - as a laptop with a touchscreen. But the fact that the screen does fold back, allowing to use the device as a tablet, is pretty amazing. The Flip has volume and power buttons on the side, but unlike 2-in-1 devices, it doesn’t imply that it’s an actual tablet and can be used instead of one. But it kind of can. Kind of. It’s a convertible after all, but also sort of a tablet. Sort of. Chrome OS adjusts its behavior once the keyboard folds beyond 180-degree angle - all windows go fullscreen, the multitask button pops up in the system panel, allowing you to switch between windows, as well as the on-screen keyboard button. Now, if you tap in a textbox, the keyboard will appear just as it does on any other tablet. It looks a lot like Google Keyboard for Android, but doesn’t act like it. For example, swiping for quick access to punctuation and special symbols is not present here, so you'll have to do more tapping. However, it does offer handwriting recognition, which requires to be online and recognizes my scrawls properly (at least in English). The touchscreen is fairly responsive, but doesn’t quite compare to higher end tablets. For the most part it allows scrolling and pinch-zooming with ease, but sometimes heavier websites and apps (like Google Play Music) might get in the way when loading their content or UI elements slower than you can interact with them. Many touch-friendly apps like Spotify, Evernote and TweetDeck generally work well. Google Maps web app would zoom and pan, but doesn’t fully support touch input only. YouTube in tablet mode works as expected - strictly for watching videos it’s fine, but the overall interface of the website is clearly designed for desktop. Netflix in its current visual form is usable, but you have to be very specific in what you tap and what and how you swipe. Reading books in Google Play Books (gosh, Google’s naming…) is possible, but the web app doesn’t support swipes to turn pages, instead you have to tap the small buttons. It’s things like that, which put the Flip in the “kinda-sorta tablet” category - you can do things like X, as long as you’re okay with Y. But given the recent notion of certain tablets desperately trying to replace laptops with a mobile OS for some reason, I’m gonna say that the Flip’s concept looks like a better compromise between the two form-factors today. Mostly because it is affordable, honest with itself and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Yes, it can act like a tablet on certain occasions, but being a Chromebook first, its key point is a full-blown, no nonsense desktop browser.[Chrome OS and offline capabilities]The operating system has noticeably matured over the years that I’ve been using Chromebooks. No longer it is laughed at or misunderstood by popular tech reviewers and news sources. I presume the reason for this is that at some point they’ve began actually trying it out and using beyond the few days review period. Once you give Chromebooks a chance with an open mind, like them or not, whether they suit your needs or they don’t, you will most likely agree that for the vast majority of computer users they are more than sufficient. The idea that an average user absolutely needs to run a bulky expensive OS, riddled with annoying error messages, inconvenient updates, security holes, vulnerabilities to bloatware and malware, to simply go online, check messages, read news, watch a TV show, talk to family and friends, type a document - is outdated and should go away. Chrome OS gets straight to the point of casual daily computing. But it doesn’t make Chromebooks useless for work - more and more businesses adopt Google Apps for Work, which makes Chrome OS devices a great option for offices and kiosks. They can save a lot of time and resources with the very low level of maintenance they require. And, as you probably already know, Chromebooks are taking education market by storm - again, because of the affordability, simplicity and easy administration. However, to this day the common perception of a Chromebook is that they are practically useless without an internet connection, which is simply not true. Watching videos and listening to music or podcasts from local or external storage, working with documents in Google Docs and Sheets, playing games and using apps - all that is possible offline in Chrome OS, and the number of offline-friendly apps keeps growing. Printing is done online and requires printers that support Google Cloud Print (many current models do), but in the modern computing world, where paper is finally going away, this limitation doesn’t feel unacceptable. Maybe it’s the shortage of local storage of Chromebooks that gives the illusion of their uselessness offline, but in reality for most people who use Windows laptops or MacBooks, the lack of an internet connection very often means pretty much the same as for Chrome OS users. Keep in mind that with the purchase of the Asus Chromebook Flip you also get 100 GB of Google Drive online storage for 2 years, and few other goodies from Google. To sum up everything, if you’re looking for a compact, lightweight, well built laptop with a beautiful touchscreen and great battery life, then in this price range you’ll hardly find a better deal today.