News - Acer’s new Haswell-powered touchscreen Chromebook C720P

[HEXUS]

Here's a touchscreen Chromebook costing just a fraction of the Google Pixel.

Read more.

[Biscuit]

I don't care what size the screen is or what the cost of them is, there is absolutely no reason to use 1366x768, its an appallingly inappropriate resolution for the modern world.

Acer... stop it!

[Spud1]

this much more affordable device will surely be attractive to consumers running-up to the Christmas period.

Cheaper but still ultimately fairly pointless Especially with windows 8 haswell tablets/laptops starting to appear around this price.

I'm surprised that manufacturers are still flogging this one, are Google funding this?

[billybear]

I tried out a Chromebook in Tesco the other day and I was surprised by the speed on the previous gen Acer they were selling. I'm definitely considering one as my next purchase.

[kingpotnoodle]

he fact that it only weighs 2.98lb (1.35Kg) gives the C720P great portability

3 years ago I might've considered that excellent portability (it's actually roughly the same as my 3yr old Dell) but these days that seems pretty heavy next to tablets weighing <500g, I know it's got a larger screen than a 10" tablet but even if you proportionally scale up an iPad Air or Kindle Fire you would be nowhere near 1.35Kg.

Chromebooks compete on an OS functionality level with iOS, Android and Win RT, before I'm interested they need to match the portability of devices running those... If I am lugging 1.35Kg I expect full Windows as a payback.

[wasabi]

With £20 cashback at PCWorld the non-touchscreen version is £180 - an absolute bargain - as long as you just want to browse or play a few movies. Was very tempted but ended up with a Nexus 7 instead.

To me, the resolution is OK for the size size - the tablet resolution wars are simply getting silly in the way the old Mhz wars were in the P4/Athlon era.

[Spud1]

Chromebooks compete on an OS functionality level with iOS, Android and Win RT, before I'm interested they need to match the portability of devices running those... If I am lugging 1.35Kg I expect full Windows as a payback.

Really?

I get what you mean, as yes out of the box all of those mobile OS's are fairly limited..but all of them offer so much more than chromeOS out of the box. Chrome OS's biggest limiting feature is well, Chrome. It's a browser based OS for all intents and purposes, so the text editor you use is limited to being a "web editor" at best, even when offline....I find Google Docs to be horrible to work with at the best of times, and I have played with a chromebook in PC world to confirm that its just as bad on a chromebook as it is in chrome on my PC..identical infact, which isn't a surprise

This is one of those products that is kinda cool as a concept and tech demo..the very idea of an OS that isn't really an OS is fun from a technology perspective...they are selling a few due to some clever marketing too - but when you think about it, they still don't make sense at the price they are asking.

£50-£100? You can justify that just about - but more than that and there is just too much out there that does the same or more, but better.

All that said however - at this sort of money they start to become a really good hacker machine. The Pixel for example, can also run various linux distributions with very little effort..OK so thats a £1k insanely priced gadget, but hopefully even these budget versions will be able to run linux. Then you have a relatively lightweight, thin device that runs linux and is therefore infinitely more useful.

Anyone without money to burn should still just buy a tablet + keyboard combination or cheap laptop though, infinitely better value without any loss in functionality.