Mini-review: 24 hours with Dell?s fanciest Chromebook yet

Most of Dell's Chrome OS notebooks share those useful traits, so when the company stepped out of the box and debuted its $599 Inspiron Chromebook 14 at the end of last year, my interested was piqued.This device isn't the penny-pinching plastic laptop that so many think of when they hear "Chromebook." Instead, it follows the new trend of high-end Chrome OS devices designed to offer alternatives to Google's own $999 Pixelbook. While that's pretty standard, especially for Chromebooks, it seems like Dell had the space to include another USB-A port but it chose not to do so.I may be harping too much on space, but overall the Inspiron Chromebook 14 looks and feels too large to me. It's not an ideal tool for artists, but it's decently pressure-sensitive and works with any stylus-enabled Google Play Store app as well as Chrome OS' native pen tools.Our review unit is the only spec configuration of the Inspiron Chromebook 14 that Dell sells, and it runs on a Core i3-8130U processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. Most Chromebook users could work just fine on a Core m3 processor, which provides just enough power to run Chrome OS smoothly even when faced with a bunch of tabs and Android apps.A Core i3 processor is just one step above that, and it showed on the Inspiron Chromebook 14. The Core i3 gives it enough power to sustain most users' work, but options to increase the RAM to 8GB and decrease the storage to 64GB would have added welcomed variety.In terms of battery life, Dell estimates that the Inspiron Chromebook 14 will last about 10 hours on a single charge. And if nothing else, Google's Pixelbook and the new Pixel Slate can use their ultra-minimalistic designs to their advantage.While some users (like myself) may not like the one-configuration approach, others will gravitate toward a device like the Inspiron Chromebook 14, because it removes a lot of decision-making that some users don't want to do.