HP's rugged Chromebook x360 convertible is available to all

If you saw HP's Chromebook x360 and yearned for the day when you didn't have to be a student to try it, you now have your chance. HP has made the 11-inch convertible Chrome OS machine available to everyone, with a starting price of $300 in the US for a system with a 1.1GHz Celeron, 4GB of RAM and 16GB of expandable storage. You can spring for 32GB of storage if you depend heavily on Android apps or don't quite store as much in the cloud as Google might like.

As with the educational model, the party trick here is the combination of a rugged frame with a '360-degree' touchscreen well-suited to running Android apps. This is a laptop that can survive a tumble to the ground at one moment and serve as a YouTube viewer in the next. It's not necessarily the best hybrid Chromebook you can get (you'd want to consider ASUS' more powerful Chromebook Flip, for example), but the price could be right.