The HP Chromebase All-in-One 22 ($479.99) is a rarity among Chrome OS devices: It’s an all-in-one (AIO) desktop, not a laptop. Instead of a Chromebook you might use for school or as a secondary computer, the Chromebase is meant for your den or kitchen. And it’s no ordinary AIO. In addition to using Chrome OS instead of macOS or Windows, the HP Chromebase stands apart from the AIO crowd with a display that can rotate between landscape and portrait modes. We’re not completely sold on the rotating touchscreen panel, but we found plenty to like about this attractive, affordable, and unique Chrome OS computer. It earns an Editors’ Choice award among budget AIO desktops.
From Landscape to Portrait…and Back Again
The HP Chromebase All-in-One 22 sits on a cone-shaped base that doubles as a speaker. The cone is only 6.7 inches in diameter, which should allow it to fit in a variety of spots in your home: on a desk, an end table, or your kitchen counter. With its white exterior and gray, fabric-wrapped base, it should also blend in with any modern room decor. It looks more like an oversize iPad attached to a smart speaker than a computer.
The display is a touch panel with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) native resolution and a modest 250-nit maximum brightness rating. I find the resolution to be stretched a bit thin across the 21.5-inch display. The image is fairly crisp, but it begins to look pixelated when you are seated up close. The resolution suffices for web browsing and watching 1080p videos, but it’s less useful for serious media editing. On the bright side, I think HP is underselling the Chromebase’s screen backlight. In our testing, the display’s maximum brightness registered at nearly double its 250-nit rating. It’s plenty bright in my sunny office.
While the HP Chromebase isn’t a good fit for photo and video editing, it does have a unique feature intended to expand its utility for general home use. With just a finger, you can spin the display from landscape to portrait mode. Just press down on the top-right corner, and it smoothly swings around into a vertical orientation.
What do you do with a nearly 22-inch display in portrait mode? HP suggests it is better for scrolling through long webpages and social media sites, and I’d agree. I particularly enjoyed scrolling through my Twitter and Reddit feeds in portrait mode. And I also enjoyed watching YouTube in portrait mode because it made it easier to peruse the comments while watching a video. Reading The New York Times in portrait mode was awesome. The homepage was a natural fit for the vertical orientation, and reading longer articles required less scrolling.
It’s not all wine and rotating roses, however. For one thing, if you’ve got multiple windows open, the rotation tends to jumble them, and you’ll find them in different locations when you return to landscape mode. In most cases that’s not too big an issue, since most Chrome OS users have a single Chrome window open and multitask via browser tabs, versus working in separate windows.
You should also be aware that while Chrome, the Chrome Web Store, and other apps resize properly to fit into portrait mode, other apps do not. The Google Play store, for example, remains too wide to fit inside the narrow boundaries in portrait mode. And my hopes that I could use the display in portrait mode to play supersized Android games were quickly dashed. Android games (installed via the Google Play store) did not recognize the display’s ability to morph into portrait mode.
The display sits up high on the base, and there is no height adjustment. The bottom of the screen bezel is a healthy 6.5 inches above the bottom of the base when it’s in landscape mode, and it needs all of that room so you can swing it into portrait mode. The display rotates clockwise into portrait mode, which then leaves only 2.4 inches of clearance between the bottom of the display and your desk or table.
The touch panel has a glossy finish, which can result in some distracting glare and reflections. Because of that, it’s nice that the display offers 20 degrees of tilt adjustment to let you get the angle right and fend off the worst of the glare.
A 5-megapixel webcam sits above the display when it’s in landscape mode, or to its right when it’s in portrait mode. It records video up to an exceptional 2,560-by-1,944-pixel resolution. It’s able to capture much crisper video than the average 720p Chromebook webcam, and with much less noise. It also performs well in both light and dark conditions, exhibiting images that are well balanced with accurate colors and skin tones. And the camera features a clever and unique two-step privacy cover. You can slide it halfway over to turn off the video but keep the microphone on. You slide it all the way closed to mute the mic, too.
The Base Is Ace
The base not only supports the display but also houses the system’s speakers and ports. Beneath the gray cone of fabric is a pair of 5-watt stereo speakers. They produce surprisingly loud and clear audio. Squeezing in a dedicated woofer would add to depth to music playback, but even absent that, the HP Chromebase’s stereo speakers produce enough bass response to make music playback a pleasing experience in a small room.
The ports are all located in a neat column on the back of the base. At the top of the stack is a power button, and beneath it are a quartet of USB ports, plus a headphone/microphone combo jack. The four USB ports are split between the Type-A and Type-C variety, and the USB-C ports support power delivery and DisplayPort video output.
On the right side of the base is a volume rocker. It’s less useful when the Chromebase is in portrait mode because you are forced to reach around the display. You are more likely to use the volume keys on the included keyboard, however, than the volume rocker on the base. I would have preferred it if the audio jack were located on the side with the volume rocker to save me from having to reach around to the back of the base to plug in headphones.
The HP Chromebase includes a wireless keyboard and mouse, which is much appreciated on such an inexpensive computer. Most budget all-in-one PCs include a wired pair, but who needs a bunch of wires cluttering such an otherwise clean design? The keyboard is compact but comfortable. It also includes dedicated and always useful volume, mute, and screen brightness keys in the top row.
Testing the Chromebase All-in-One 22: Pentium Pep in Chrome OS
As the baseline model in the lineup, our HP Chromebase All-in-One 22 review unit features a dual-core Intel Pentium Gold 6405U CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of eMMC storage. You can customize a configuration on HP’s site; upgrades include the Core i3-10110U chip, up to 16GB of RAM, and up to a 256GB SSD. The HP Chromebase is the only Chrome OS-based AIO desktop we’ve reviewed, which leaves laptop-format Chromebooks as the main measuring sticks for assessing its performance. I selected a variety of Chromebooks, from the Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 to the Core i5-based Google Pixelbook Go.
We test Chromebooks with three overall performance benchmark suites—one Chrome OS, one Android, and one online. The first, Principled Technologies’ CrXPRT 2, measures how quickly a system performs everyday tasks in six workloads such as applying photo effects, graphing a stock portfolio, analyzing DNA sequences, and generating 3D shapes using WebGL. The second, UL’s PCMark for Android Work 3.0, performs assorted productivity operations in a smartphone-style window. Finally, Basemark Web 3.0 runs in a browser tab to combine low-level JavaScript calculations with CSS and WebGL content. All three yield numeric scores; higher numbers are better.
The HP Chromebase finished in the middle of the pack on these tests. It trailed the Core i3-based Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 and Core i5-based Google Pixelbook Go, finished ahead of the IdeaPad Duet 5 and Celeron-based Dell Chromebook 11, and was neck-and-neck with the Pentium Silver-based HP Chromebook x360.
In anecdotal testing, the Chromebase felt peppy for general use, from browsing the web across a dozen Chrome tabs and streaming 1080p video to playing Android games. For most home users, the Pentium Gold CPU and 4GB of RAM provides enough muscle to smoothly run the lightweight Chrome OS.
Two other Android benchmarks focus on the CPU and GPU, respectively. Primate Labs’ Geekbench uses all available cores and threads to simulate real-world applications ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning, while GFXBench 5.0 stress-tests both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering that exercises graphics and compute shaders. Geekbench delivers a numeric score, while GFXBench counts frames per second (fps).
The HP Chromebase struggled on Geekbench, besting only the Chromebook 11 and finishing a considerable distance behind the Chromebook x360. On GFXBench, none of the Chromebooks outside of the Pixelbook Go posted frame rates that would raise the eyebrow of a gamer. That said, the HP Chromebase is still quite capable of running casual Android games.
Painting a Portrait in Chrome
I doubt I would rotate the HP Chromebase’s display into portrait mode with any regularity, but I could see myself getting in the habit of spinning it into portrait mode when scrolling through Twitter and Reddit, or while reading The New York Times. With multiple windows open, rotating between landscape and portrait modes can be a bit clumsy, but it works well when you just have a single Chrome window open, which is how I spend most of my time with Chrome OS—and as I would imagine you do, too.
Even without the rotating display, the HP Chromebase All-in-One 22 is an affordable and attractive Chrome OS desktop for home use. And if you aren’t buying it as your primary computer but as a secondary device for browsing the web, you don’t need to spend more to upgrade it beyond the Pentium-based configuration we tested. It has enough oomph to run the lightweight Chrome OS and engage in some light multitasking. Package it all up with a palatable under-$500 asking price, and you get a unique kitchen PC that easily deserves an Editors’ Choice award.
