Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook review: It hits a sweet spot

Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook $279.00 The Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook is one of the few Chromebooks worth recommending. It hits a sweet spot with its good-sized display, long battery life, and compact design.

The Chromebook has found its sweet spot, and it's around the $279 range where the Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook resides. It sure isn't down in the dumps with the $200-or-so cheapies, with their clackety plastics and sorry little screens. Nor is it in the 1-percenter fantasyland of the gorgeous and expensive Chromebook Pixel. The $250 Samsung Chromebook 3 is nice, and if you jumped to $300 you could get an 11-inch  touchscreen in the Acer C270P, or a 14-inch (non-touch) display in the HP Chromebook 14. But for $279, the Toshiba CB35-A3120 is nearly as good as those higher-priced competitors. It's also a notch better than the like-priced HP Chromebook 11, despite the latter’s many charms (and much simpler name).

Image: Michael Homnick

A top-down view shows the roomy clickpad and island-style keyboard.

What the Toshiba CB35-A3120 has over the HP Chromebook 11 are a much larger, 13.3-inch LED backlit display, a mobile-friendly Intel Celeron 2955U (Haswell) processor, and a 52Wh, 4-Cell Li-Ion battery. Performance is good, scoring 2910 in Peacekeeper. The battery lasted almost 7 hours in our tests—nearly identical to the HP Chromebook 14’s result (also sporting Haswell, plus a 51Wh, 4-cell battery), and noticeably longer than what the HP Chromebook 11 achieved with its ARM processor and 30Wh battery.

Image: Michael Homnick

The right side has an audio jack, two USB 3.0 ports, and an HDMI-out port.

The CB35-A3120 also trumps the Chromebook 11 in connectivity, sporting two USB 3.0 ports (the HP has just USB 2.0) as well as an SD card slot, headphone jack, and HDMI-out port. Wi-Fi 802.11a/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 are built-in, and a webcam and microphone sit atop the display. Built-in stereo speakers deliver tolerably tinny sound.

Image: Michael Homnick

The left side has an SD card slot along with AC and lock ports.

I always feel cramped on the 11-inch displays of most low-end Chromebooks. The wide, 16:9 aspect ratio of the CB35-A3120’s display keeps the device compact (8.9 by 12.9 by 0.80 inches), unlike the decidedly bulkier HP Chromebook 14. The 1366-by-768-pixel resolution is nothing special, nor is the occasionally choppy-blocky video playback (it supports 720p), but this is typical for the price range, unfortunately.

Image: Michael Homnick

The dotty-textured surface is more interesting than smooth plastic and easy to grip as well.

At this price you also get a “Sunray Silver” plastic chassis whose dotty-textured surface is both attractive and easy to grip. I dislike the slight bendiness to the display lid, but the bottom half is nicely stiff. The 3.3-pound weight is very easy to tote.

Image: Michael Homnick

The CB35-A3120 is slender, small, and light enough to carry easily.

Most low-end Chromebooks have crummy keyboards: hard plastic, hard travel. The CB35-A3120’s island-style keys are hard, but the softer travel was a pleasant surprise—heavy typists will appreciate the difference. The top-row function keys and lower-right cursor keys are half-sized, but usable. The clickpad is roomy and pretty responsive.

Image: Michael Homnick

The half-size cursor and function keys are still usable.

The Chromebook’s other features include 2GB of DDR3L 1600MHz memory and a 16GB SSD. You get 100GB free on Google Drive but for only 2 years, so prepare for the end.

Chromebooks are hitting their stride. With the Toshiba CB35-A3120 Chromebook, there’s now a handful of models I’m actually willing to recommend. My current attainable favorite (that is, not the Chromebook Pixel) is the HP Chromebook 14. But for greater portability, competitive attributes, and slightly less cash, the CB35-A3120 is a tempting alternative.

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PlayLater Lets You Watch Your Shows on the Web--And In Your Own Sweet Time

What do you get if you cross Hulu with TiVo? This may sound like the start of a joke, but the answer is PlayLater, an online DVR that's definitely not a punch line. At $40 per year (currently discounted to $20 per year), it's certainly cheaper than a cable package.

PlayLater's neat and clean interface makes it easy to find shows to record and to play back your recordings.PlayLater is the latest application from MediaMall Technologies, the company behind PlayOn, a piece of software that lets you place-shift online video. With PlayOn, you can watch video from Hulu, Netflix, or several other sources, on devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Wii, Roku, and more. Where PlayOn focuses on place-shifting, PlayLater is all about time shifting: This handy PC-focused application lets you record online video for watching later. PCWorld last reviewed PlayLater when in was in beta.

When you launch PlayLater on your Windows PC, it displays its Guide screen, which shows you all of the online video sources you can use. PlayLater has access to all of PlayOn's video sources, which include Amazon Video on Demand, CBS, Nick, PBS Kids, TBS, and more, in addition to the already-mentioned Hulu and Netflix. From the Guide, you can select a video source or channel, and then browse through or search for available shows. PlayLater is neatly laid out and makes it a cinch to find the shows you want. Once you locate the show you'd like to record, you can click it to initiate the recording. You can initiate recordings from within the PlayLater app only; you cannot go to a third-party video site and request to record a video from there. The folks at PlayLater say this capability may be added in the future, in the form of a toolbar you install.

And then PlayLater goes to work in the background. The application fires up its own browser window, which is invisible to you, and plays the requested video, capturing it as it plays. The video in question is not actually downloaded, but recorded and saved as an encrypted video file. Recording a video takes exactly as long as it does to play it, and the recording captures the entire video as it would play in browser, any ads included.

You can only record one video at a time, but you can queue up multiple videos to record in succession. The company says it may lift this restriction in the future, but notes that the video recording process can be taxing on your system, so you may not want to record multiple videos at once, anyway. I noticed no performance issues on my two-year-old Windows 7 PC when testing PlayLater.

You cannot watch the video while it is recording, and you can't start the playback until the recording is complete. PlayLater doesn't play back the video in its own application, but instead does so in Windows Media Player. The company says the decision to use Windows Media Player instead of a custom-built player was made because the application is Windows-only, and every Windows PC comes with the software installed.

I'm not typically a fan of Windows Media Player--I prefer the excellent VLC media player--but it didn't bother me when using PlayLater. Maybe I was so excited about the fact that I could amass my own offline-accessible library of online shows. I don't have to worry about Hulu pushing my favorite episodes out for newer ones, and as long as I have a PlayLater subscription, I don't have to stress when I want to watch online videos when I'm traveling and without an Internet connection. PlayLater has solved all of these problems by creating the software application I had no idea I always wanted.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

-- Liane Cassavoy

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