Acer has announced that its first Chrome OS laptop will be available this month for $349.99 with a 3G capable model coming later this summer. The company had planned to deliver the Acer AC700 Chromebook on June 15th, but after missing that target date, Acer sent out a press release announced the imminent launch of the device today.
The Acer AC700 features an 11.6 inch display, a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N570 dual core processor, 2GB of DDR3 RAM and a 16GB solid state disk. The Chromebook has 2 USB ports, a4-in-1 card reader, and 802.11b/g/n WiFi. It has a 6 cell abttery and weighs 2.95 pounds.
The Acer laptop is a cheaper alternative to the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook which starts at $429.99. But honestly, the two laptops look very similar on paper. The biggest difference is that Samsung’s model has a 12.1 inch display and Samsung claims you should get up to 8 hours of battery life while Acer promises around 6 hours of run time. In my tests, the Samsung Series 5 tended to top out at about 6.5 hours under real-world conditions.
Both are designed to run Google Chrome OS, which is an operating system designed around a web browser.