Category: Asus

Chromebooks are incredible, lightweight devices, and I’ll show you how to use them

(Image credit: Konstantin Savusia )
The best Chromebooks are known as the most user-friendly devices on the market, making them easily some of the best laptops for those seeking a simple yet efficient computing experience.

Whether you’re a student, a professional, or a casual user, navigating and utilizing the wealth of Chromebook features can significantly enhance your productivity and streamline your daily tasks.

One of the Chromebook’s most appealing features is its simplicity. Unlike traditional laptops and desktops, Chromebooks are designed to be easy to use, without a lot of the bloat that many other laptops come with.

The operating system, Chrome OS, is very lightweight and is based on the same technology that powers the Chrome web browser, making it intuitive and familiar to many users right out of the box.

Chromebooks also boot-up faster and have far fewer maintenance requirements than either Windows laptops or MacBooks.

In addition to its simplicity, Chromebooks are also known for their portability. These devices are typically lightweight and compact, making them especially appealing to anyone who needs a lightweight device for on-the-go work.

Still, if you’re used to the best Windows laptops or best MacBooks, you might feel a bit lost when you first start up a Chromebook. But don’t worry, I’ve used Chromebooks for years and I’m here to help walk you through these increasingly popular devices.

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Key tips for using a Chromebook

(Image from Asus)

• Keyboard Shortcuts: Try these essential keyboard shortcuts to navigate and perform tasks more efficiently.
• Chrome Extensions: Pick up some of the best Chrome extensions that add new features and functionalities to Chrome.
• Regular Updates: Keep your Chromebook’s OS and software up-to-date for the latest features and security patches.
• Cloud Backup: Use Files’ Google Drive integration to regularly back up your important data to protect against accidental loss or hardware failure.
• Troubleshooting: Familiarize yourself (or at least bookmark) these common Chromebook troubleshooting techniques to fix any issues that may arise.

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Advanced Chromebook features 

(Image credit: HP)

While the Chromebook is designed to be user-friendly, there are advanced features that can take your Chromebook experience even further.

• Accessibility Features:Chromebooks offer a range of accessibility features, including screen readers, magnification tools, and keyboard shortcuts for users with disabilities.
• Multiple Users:If you share your Chromebook with others, you can create multiple user profiles to keep your data separate and secure.
• Remote Desktop:Access your Chromebook from another device using remote desktop features, allowing you to work on your files and applications from anywhere.
• Gaming on Chromebooks:While not as powerful as dedicated gaming consoles, Chromebooks can handle casual gaming and cloud gaming services.
• Educational Tools:Chromebooks are popular among students and educators due to their affordability, portability, and integration with educational tools like Google Classroom.

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Navigating the Chromebook interface 

(Image credit: Future / Michelle Rae Uy)
The Chromebook’s interface is designed to be intuitive, making it easy for all levels of experience to use.

The Shelf, located at the bottom of the screen, is ChromeOS’s version of macOS’s Dock or Windows 11’s Taskbar, displaying frequently used apps and shortcuts.

To access all installed applications, simply click on the App Launcher icon at the far left of the Shelf.

For quick and easy navigation, the Search Bar is a valuable tool. By typing keywords, you can search for apps, files, or web pages, streamlining your workflow and saving time.

Additionally, the System Tray, located in the bottom-right corner, provides access to essential settings like Wi-Fi, battery status, and user profiles.

Using native apps

(Image credit: Future)
One of the Chromebook’s greatest strengths lies in its app ecosystem.

Chromebooks were originally designed to rely on web-based applications, offering a seamless and efficient experience. Popular web apps like Google Docs, Gmail, and YouTube are optimized for Chromebooks, providing a wide range of productivity tools.

In recent years, however, more and more apps are becoming available offline, including the entirety of the Google Play app store, expanding a Chromebook’s functionality significantly. You can download and use popular apps like Microsoft Office, Spotify, and Netflix, just as you would on an Android smartphone or tablet.

For more advanced users, Chromebooks offer support for Linux applications. This feature is particularly valuable for developers or users who require access to powerful tools like Visual Studio Code or GIMP.

Setting up Linux on a Chromebook is relatively straightforward, allowing you to create a hybrid environment that caters to both casual and power users.

Efficient file management in the cloud

The Files app is your central hub for organizing and accessing both local and cloud-based files.

Google Drive, seamlessly integrated into the Files app, provides ample storage space for your documents, photos, and other data. By saving your files to Google Drive, you can access them from any device with an internet connection.

While Chromebooks used to offer limited local storage, that’s changed in recent years, with more premium Chromebooks featuring the same kind of storage options as more familiar Windows and Apple laptops.

For those needing even more storage, Chromebooks support external devices like USB drives, external hard drives, and SD cards. Simply plug in the device, and the Files app will automatically recognize it, allowing you to transfer files between your Chromebook and the external device.

Customize your Chromebook

To make your Chromebook truly your own, you can customize its appearance and settings. You can change the wallpaper, adjust the screen brightness, and even enable dark mode for a more visually comfortable experience.

Additionally, Chromebooks offer a variety of themes and extensions that can be installed to personalize your device further. With that, you’ll be able to make your Chromebook as personalized as you like, especially now that you know all the important tips to using your new Chromebook to its fullest.

Pros

• Revamped design
• Powerful specs
• Decent photos

Cons

• AI features are subtle compared to rivals
• Smaller battery
• Short update timeline

   There’s something different about the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro. The Asus ROG gaming phone line always surprises me with its distinctive style traditionally appealing to gamers. Yet, this year’s ROG Phone 8 series shocks me by how mainstream it looks. Gone are the spaceship-like white hues of the ROG Phone 6 and ROG Phone 7 and in comes a restrained matte black look — an understated appearance for a mature gaming phone.

While standing tall with its 6.78-inch display, gone is the upper bezel that hid the last ROG Phone 7’s front-facing camera — otherwise last seen in 2019 on phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9 and the Google Pixel 4. The ROG Phone 8 Pro has a punch-hole front-facing camera just as we see on most Android phones. The full-color secondary display on the back of the phone says goodbye in favor of a still eye-grabbing mini-LED display, which is even more arresting on the Pro model.

What results is something that looks reminiscent of the black version of the Nothing Phone 2 with the gaming chops of prior ROG phones as well as the specs and $1,200 (£1,100) starting price that we expect from this year’s Android flagships. My particular review unit is the kitted out $1,500 version of the ROG Phone 8 Pro, with a ludicrously high 24GB of memory and 1TB of storage. That maxed-out configuration allows me to easily multitask, which through my testing included alternating between Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Dead Cells and texting while waiting forever to queue into GeForce Now’s free tier for cloud gaming.

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The ROG Phone 8 Pro’s appearance might not stand out as much in a lineup of other premium Android phones, but once I actually used it, I could quickly tell it’s still a gaming phone. Unlike mainstream phones in this price range, the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro includes a headphone jack. It also continues to offer two USB-C ports, one on the bottom and another on the left side, for two different attachments or to charge your device easier while holding it horizontally. This was particularly nice to have when plugging in my Xbox controller while charging.

That side USB-C port also connects the AeroActive Cooler X fan accessory, which no longer opens a door into the phone to chill the phone’s internal components. Instead, the ROG Phone 8 Pro has a sealed exterior to achieve IP68 certification to keep out water and dust, and the Cooler just chills the outside of the phone. Clipping the accessory to the phone does still feel like attaching a spider to help keep it cool.

The Phone 8 Pro does a nice job capturing photos and videos, with processing that’s assisted by artificial intelligence powered by its Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. It’s early days for flagship phones equipped with the new AI-focused chip, and I find the other ways that the Phone 8 Pro takes advantage of AI to be more subtle. They include being able to perform contextual searches on the device, AI noise canceling on calls and text recognition inside of games.

Even with more subtle AI ambitions, the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro at its starting spec of 512GB of space and 16GB of memory is still a beast. You get the newest chip, tons of space, lots of memory, and it’s the only high-end phone out there that gives you as many ports as a MacBook Air.

Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro design, software, gameplay

While at first the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro looks like any other large black phone, the company includes a number of stylish flourishes including a new animated mini-LED screen on its back. Asus prints its Republic of Gamers logo, its “Dare to Win” mantra and an “Est. 2006” message like it’s a pair of Levi’s jeans. A fairly large camera hump houses a trio of cameras.

But the star of the phone is its animating AniMe vision mini-LED display on the back. While I’m sad to see the full color secondary display retire, the new display includes plenty of details that I’d love to see on more phones. For instance, by default the screen rotates between showing the time, your battery level and the ROG logo. The mini-LED screen can display a camera icon when you are taking a photo, a music visualizer when listening to music or custom animations that you can set up in settings. It reminds me of the LEDs on the back of the Nothing Phone 2, except this small screen allows for text and numbers that are easier to delineate than Nothing’s abstract light patterns. This screen can also be turned off if you don’t want all this blinking.

The front 6.78-inch display has an optical in-screen fingerprint sensor that can unlock the phone. By default the screen runs at an adaptive refresh rate between 1 and 120Hz, but you can have the screen run at 165Hz at all times. The screen has a 720Hz touch sampling rate — the same as last year’s Phone 7 — for responsiveness.

Both features helped when I played Dead Cells, since the game supports a higher refresh rate and battling through dungeons was easier with that responsiveness rate. The Phone 8 Pro also includes its AirTriggers sensors, which I can program like shoulder buttons when holding the phone horizontally. My preference is still to hook the phone up with a game controller when time and space allow, but for subway commuting the responsiveness for the touchscreen has been sufficient for the fast-paced game.

Like other gaming phones, the Phone 8 Pro gets warm when playing games at the higher graphics and frame rates that the phone is capable of. While Asus says that the phone now makes use of conductive cooling to draw heat to the back of the phone, I did find that it makes the back of the phone noticeably hot to touch. A case should help alleviate that, as should the aforementioned AeroActive X cooler attachment.

Using 3DMark’s 20-minute stress test when paired up with the fan attachment running at its highest cooling setting, the phone’s dashboard reported a temperature starting at 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and ending at 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit). By comparison when I ran the test without the attachment, the phone started at 33 degrees Celsius (91 degrees Fahrenheit) and ended at a noticeably hotter 53 degrees Celsius (127 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s worth noting that 3DMark’s test is particularly demanding for any phone but could be a comparison for a gamer that’s particularly adept at pushing the limits.

Asus carried over other gaming-focused features from prior years, including a Background mode that can keep an app active even if you turn off the screen, an in-game dashboard to quickly access settings, the ability to customize settings for particular games and the new AI-grabber to scan text within a game. Asus suggests that the feature could be useful for quickly copying and pasting terms inside of a game and then searching the web for related guides.

Another of the Phone 8 Pro’s AI features is its noise cancellation feature for voice and video calls, which works across any service that makes these. This includes services like WhatsApp and within game chat services like Discord.

While these gaming modes are the main draw for the ROG Phone 8 Pro, the new redesign comes with a lot of perks toward how the phone looks and feels. It’s noticeably lighter than last year’s phone, coming in at 225g versus the Phone 7 Ultimate’s 246g. And by eliminating the top bezel of the phone, the Phone 8 Pro’s now 163.8mm (6.4-inches) tall, shorter than the Phone 7 Ultimate’s 173mm (6.7-inches). While Asus was able to keep the display size between the two phones the same, it’s worth noting that the front-facing camera now occupies a punch-hole space within the display much like other Android phones, which might not be great for gamers that prefer an uninterrupted view across their entire screen.

Gaming phone rival RedMagic for instance uses an under-display front-facing camera to provide that unobstructed view, but photos taken by under-display cameras aren’t yet at the same quality as those shooting from a hole cut out of the display. To accommodate this, Asus provides an option to either let games fill the full screen or shrink the display area slightly in order to avoid the cutout from interfering. Most games are unlikely to be affected by the loss of space, but the option is there in the event that it might.

The ROG Phone 8 Pro has a 5,500mAh battery, which is smaller but still sizable compared with the ROG Phone 7’s 6,000mAh battery. While I found the ROG Phone 7’s 6,000mAh to easily get me through two days of use, I found a more mixed result with the ROG Phone 8 Pro.

On days with heavy use, such as one where I ran GeForce Now in the background for several hours while I did other tasks and played games stored locally, I drew the full battery down to 20% by the end of the day. With less intensive use, which still included an hour of gameplay and miscellaneous tasks like calls, texting and music, I was able to stretch the battery to last through two days of use on a single charge. While your mileage will vary according to how power hungry your usage is, Asus does ship the phone with a 65-watt wired charger and this year’s phone includes 15-watt wireless charging. In my 30-minute wired charging test, I was able to get the battery from 0% to 69% while the 30-minute wireless charging test took it from 1% to 26%.