Acer’s latest Chromebook is a thin and light Chrome OS laptop with longer battery life and a faster processor than any model the company’s released to date.

The Acer C720 Chromebook is powered by an Intel Celeron 2955U Haswell processor and Acer says the computer should be able to get up to 8.5 hours of battery life.

It has 4GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, and the Acer C720 Chromebook goes up for pre-order today for $250 or less.

Acer C720 Chromebook

Acer says additional models will be available in the coming weeks, and that could include the touchscreen model we’ve been hearing about.

But at $250, the Acer C720 already looks like a pretty compelling option. It has twice the RAM, a few hours longer battery life, and a faster processor than the HP Chromebook 11, for instance — and that model sells for $280.

One thing HP’s laptop has going for it is size: it measures just 0.7 inches thick and weighs 2.3 pounds, while the Acer C720 is 0.75 inches thick and 2.76 pounds. It’s not exactly heavy, but it’s not as light as some competitors.

Other features include USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, HDMI output, and 802.11b/g/n WiFi.

Chromebooks haven’t entirely cornered the market on cheap laptops, but over the past year or two we’ve seen a number of compelling Chrome OS laptops that are cheap, portable, and fairly capable machines — as long as you don’t mind using an operating system that’s designed around a web browser and which works best when you have an internet connection.

Chrome OS isn’t for everyone, but it’s a sort of more-is-less approach toward computers. Instead of filling up a PC with bloatware that can slow down performance, Chrome OS users primarily run web apps. Security and feature updates are pushed automatically. And since most of your data and settings are stored online, if you lose a Chromebook or want to replace it for another reason, all you have to do is sign into a new model with your Google credentials and you’ll be back to where you left off in a matter of minutes.

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11 replies on “Acer launches C720 Chromebook with Haswell CPU for $250”

  1. I returned my Acer to Walmart for the second time. Once because I figured there was something wrong with it and so I got a new one and twice after I realized that the replacement was just as bad as the original.

    The 199$ Acer is unbearably slow for a computer that only runs Chrome.

  2. I think I’ll go for the new HP Chromebook 14 it’s said to be priced at 299$ and looks better, than the ageing design of the ASUS

  3. be nice if this has room for a standard SSD or notebook harddrive in case someone wants to buy it to put a real linux distro on it.

  4. I wonder how much work it would take to get Linux Mint running on this machine. I am thinking it wouldn’t take much. Though it is not listed above, it looks like it has a SD card slot. That would work for storage. 😉

    1. Likely not much, as Chromebooks have a developer switch (more like a boot time key combo in more recent models) that allow access on par with a normal laptop.

  5. yikes. preferred when acer had the more conventionally labelled keys on their chromebook; may still bite if there’s ever an amd model

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