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Acer Officially Announces C720 Chromebook
adeelarshad82 writes "Acer officially announced its new Chromebook, C720. The C720 is 30% thinner (at 0.75 inches thick) and lighter (at 2.76 pounds) than Acer's previous Chromebook, C7. The C720 Chromebook has an 11.6-inch anti-glare widescreen, with a 1,366-by-768 resolution. Acer claims seven second boot times and up to 8.5 hours of battery life. The C720 comes with 4GB of DDR3L memory and uses an Intel Celeron 2955U processor based on Haswell technology. The system also has 16GB of local SSD storage along with 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi to get to Google's cloud-based storage. Like previous Chromebooks, the C720 Chromebook is constantly updated with the latest version of the Chrome OS and built around the Chrome browser." One thing this machine lacks is the most intriguing feature of the new ARM-based (and lower-power) Chromebook 11 from HP: charging via Micro-USB.
0.75 inches = 19 mm
2.76 punds = 1.25 kg
Yup. I lost interest at 1366 followed by 768.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It has been told many times already. 768 dots may be OK for a phone. For a laptop, anything less than a 1000 is just sad news.
The page linked to has annoying ad pop-ups that show when you hover the mouse pointer over keywords. The summary above is practically all the info in the article, so there is no reason to go there.
And by the way... How did this article get up-voted enough to get to the first page? There is nothing particularly interesting about yet another Chromebook with incremental updates over its predecessor ... or is there?
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I recently replaced my MacBook Air with a Acer Chromebook refurb I picked up for $150 on ebay. It is an awesome portable dev machine. Good battery life, and Crouton is incredible. You can run Linux and ChromeOS simultaneously (via a chroot); it makes switching between the a matter of two keystrokes. I never thought I'd actually like ChromeOS, but it's actually pretty slick.
I see Chromebooks as:
1) For those who want to serf the web casually but prefer mouse and keyboard over touchscreen interfaces.
2) A proper netbook, as it was supposed to be. The first netbooks were quite similar to the Chromebook concept, a legacy-free system with a small (often Linux-based) OS that wasn't too taxing on the machine. Then Windows hijacked the "netbook" concept and made them into underpowered Windows PCs instead.
That said, I really don't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to also run touch-oriented Android apps on the ChromeOS desktop.
Google, go show Microsoft how it should be done!
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Chromebooks are actually doing pretty well.
I'm a huge Android fan, but there are some issues with apps on Android that don't translate too well to the laptop experience (yet):
That said, Android is open source. You're free to do a port yourself. Some have done so already.
It runs OK (google Chrubuntu), but the WiFi and trackpad drivers were so finicky that it was a deal breaker. ChromeOS actually is a stripped down version of Linux, which means that you can actually run a full-blown linux desktop along side it via Crouton (using a chroot). If that sounds tedious, it is actually fool-proof to install.
Since the trackpad and WiFi drivers are still handled by ChromeOS (again, a linux kernel), it works great! If you are looking for a good linux laptop, I'd highly recommend it, especially if price and battery are your two main considerations.
I see Chromebooks as:
1) For those who want to serf the web
Your page is ready m'lord.
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