The Samsung Chromebook 4 (2019) is a tough-feeling, well-built Chrome OS laptop. It has a battery life of over 10 hours for light productivity tasks, and its small, lightweight design makes it surprisingly portable. It is fanless, so it is completely silent, and the keyboard never gets uncomfortably hot under load. The keyboard has good typing feel but is not backlit. The touchpad tracks decently but is a bit small, and there is a decent webcam and microphone for video calls. Also, the speakers are not very loud, but are generally satisfactory. Unfortunately, like most budget Chromebooks, the screen doesn’t get much brighter, and its poor color gamut makes the content look washed out. The port selection is also disappointing, requiring the use of a dongle or USB hub if you want to use multiple wired peripherals. All variants use an 11.6-inch, 720p TN display and an Intel Celeron N4000 CPU with integrated Intel UHD Graphics 600. You can opt for either 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 16, 32, or 64GB of storage. All of these are capable of light productivity tasks and playing videos without problems, but unless you upgrade to 6GB of RAM, the laptop will hiccup if you have many tabs open. None of the models are suitable for 3D rendering, computational workloads, or playing graphics-intensive games. While acceptable laptop screens graduated to 1,920-by-1,080-pixel or higher resolutions years ago, you can still find 1,366-by-768 panels in the 11.6-inch segment. Such low pixel counts mean that Samsung will not display fine detail, and letters appear faint and blurry. (As with most Chromebooks, you can call on lower “look like” resolution scaling if you want icons and screen elements to appear larger…) . Also, the Chromebook 4’s antique Twisted-Nematic (TN) rather than In-Plane Switching (IPS), panel technology translates to narrow viewing angles and dishwasher murky colors.
