Acer’s C270P touch-equipped Chromebook checks in at a mass market price.
Google has lowered the price of entry for touch-equipped Chromebooks with the Acer C270P, a brand new offering that costs $1,000 under the powerful Pixel.
Touchscreens have pervaded our everyday computing lives. All smartphones and tablets are equipped with displays that react to taps, swipes, slides, and pinches. Moving from a tablet to a laptop may be frustrating, especially when the laptop requires users to navigate the screen with a trackpad as opposed to with their fingers. That’s why Google introduced the Pixel Chromebook earlier this year. The uber-Chromebook strongly resembles Apple’s popular MacBook Air line of portables, and incorporates a high-resolution touch display. It is a premium machine. The price, however, is astronomical at $1,299. Pretty much as good because the Pixel is, the price outweighs the advantage of the touchscreen device.
Enter the Acer C270P. It’s built at the same chassis because the C270, but ups the ante around the board. This low-cost Chromebook includes an 11.6-inch LED backlit display that supports 10-finger touch for tapping and swiping. The screen has 1366 x 768 pixels, which qualifies it as a high-definition screen, though it trails the Pixel’s 2560 x 1700 display by a vital margin. The screen uses Intel HD Graphics with 128 MB of dedicated system memory. It offers moderate viewing angles at 145 degrees.
The C270P is powered by the Intel Celeron 2955U processor, in line with the Haswell architecture, which runs at 1.4 GHz. It comes with 2 MB of L3 cache, 2 GB of DDR3L SDRAM, and 32 GB of built-in storage. It supports SD memory cards for expanded storage and gives native integration with Google’s cloud-based Google Drive.
One of the Pixel’s main selling points, other than the high-resolution touchscreen, is that it comes with 1 TB of online storage. The Acer C270P doesn’t. Instead, it offers only 100 GB of Google Drive storage.
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Connectivity options include 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0. There isn’t any LTE model available. The C270P has one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0 port, one HDMI port, and a typical stereo headphone/microphone jack. There is a built-in 720p HD webcam that doubles as a VGA camera and stereo speakers. The C270P features a full-sized Acer FineTip keyboard and a multi-gesture touchpad. The C270P has a 3-cell lithium-polymer battery that Google says provides as much as 7.5 hours of battery life. The laptop measures 0.78 inches thick and weighs 2.98 pounds.
The Acer C270P is accessible for preorder on Amazon.com. The device costs $299 and could ship in mid-December. The Amazon product page says there’ll be limited quantities.
If the Pixel appealed to you because of the touchscreen, the C270P offers that key feature at a far more reasonable cost. The C270P loses the Pixel’s great industrial design and large online storage, however the tradeoffs could be worth it.
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