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As expected, Acer is giving its Chromebook lineup a special touch. The new Acer C720P Chromebook is the company’s first Chrome OS laptop with a touchscreen.
At $299.99, it’s also the cheapest touchscreen Chromebook released to date… which would be more impressive if the $1299 Google Chromebook Pixel weren’t the only competition.
The Acer C720P should be available from Amazon, Acer, and Best Buy starting in December.
Update: It’s up for pre-order from Amazon.
The laptop features an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel touchscreen display, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and an Intel Celeron 2955U Haswell processor. Acer says it should get up to 7.5 hours of battery life and the laptop boots in just 7 seconds.
It features 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, has an HDMI port and USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, and measures 0.78 inches thick, and weighs 2.98 pounds.
Like most other recent Chromebooks, this one comes with 100GB of free cloud storage with Google Drive for 2 years. Customers also get 12 free Gogo in-flight WiFi passes.
And like all Chromebooks, this is a laptop designed to run Google’s browser-based operating system. Chrome OS has come a long way in the last few years with support for a growing number of apps that can function even without an internet connection. But this isn’t a laptop for folks that want to run Microsoft Office or iTunes. Instead it’s designed for folks who are comfortable with Google Docs (or Microsoft Office Web Apps) and Google Play Music (or Rdio).
Still, it’s a relatively cheap laptop with a relatively speedy processor and the security that comes with an operating system that updates automatically and keeps apps either in the cloud or sandboxed to prevent malware from infecting your machine. Chromebooks aren’t for everyone, but at $300, the Acer C720p is certainly an attractive option for folks who are already sold on the Chrome OS platform.
This looks promising, disappointed that it only has 2GB Ram though, all computers need 4GB really.
I love my $249 Samsung Google Chromebook. It works great with NO WinTel Inside!
I’m disappointed it only comes with 2 gigs of ram.
Me too. What the heck? The C720 has 4GB of RAM. There’s no way I could go back to 2GB at this point 🙂
To be fair the c720 comes in both a 2 and 4gb version. Let’s hope a touchscreen 4gb version is on the way
Sure makes me want to try it, but Newegg already grabbed my “present to myself” money.
I can’t find any info about upgrading ram or even the internals of the C270 laptops. I wonder if you can even swap the ssd, or open it at all.
Well, word is out there, e.g. on reddit: You can upgrade the SSD (people have run into problems, though), but that’s it unless you have access to pro-grade soldering equipment, which could allow you to add some ram.
The RAM is soldered on so upgrading is damn near impossible but the SSD is an M.2 form factor SSD, you should be able to swap it out for something larger …. once that form factor becomes more widely available in the market, haven’t seen a single one yet
Saw a discussion/thread on reddit where a guy bought a 128GB SSD on Amazon and successfully swapped it in a C720.