Acer C7 Chromebook

The Acer C7 Chromebook is a budget netbook boasting the Google Chromebook OS, but has it got the neccesary spec to beat rival offerings?
Good buildDecent screen100GB of cloud storageGoogle OS lacks appsNo Bluetooth
Google's Chromebook OS has been adopted by Samsung already but it's Acer that has created a budget netbook - in the form of the Acer C7 Chromebook - with the spec to beat rivals at the price point.
Can the Google OS and decent spec compete with rival Sony Vaio netbooks and budget ultrabooks? And can the Acer take on the likes of the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook and Samsung series 5 Chromebook?
The grey plastic surround and weighty feel in the hand doesn't feel cheap - it's a familiar Acer design you'll have seen on netbooks and, in short, it works.
There's a great, soft touch keyboard, all the inputs you would hope for and nice curves to boot. You won't feel embarrassed using this on the train and twisting the screen up and down feels smooth and reliable, avoiding the brittle, thin feel of rivals.
The battery is easily removable and even the SD card slot has a neat protector - every design function is well thought out. Yes, the ventilation is on the bottom of the unit which means it can get hot on your lap but the low-powered processor doesn't kick out huge amounts of heat compared to a full size laptop.
The 16:9 ratio screen is an acceptable resolution and solid but, more importantly, it's ideal for BBC iPlayer and movies on the go and offers enough real estate to make editing documents and answering emails easy.
There's an impressive 320GB of storage inside, alongside a free 100GB Google Drive account so you can back up everything in the cloud. An SD card slot allows further expansion and all other laptop outputs and inputs are present - VGA out, HDMI, three USB ports and an old-fashioned ethernet port for wired internet. There's also a webcam and headphone input for basic Skype needs too.

Hardware

In terms of hardware, the C7 is a barebones affair though to be honest we didn’t expect otherwise for the price. At exactly three pounds, the C7 is light but it doesn’t feel compact. Since the entire machine is constructed of incredibly light (read: cheap) plastic, the battery at the rear of the machine contains the vast majority of the Chromebook’s weight. This leaves the computer’s heft feeling unbalanced toward the back and unwieldy when being toted around the house and pulled from a bag.

The gray-blue hue of the lid is the sharpest looking part of the laptop. It has a speckled shine to it. There’s an off-white, silk-screened Acer logo in the middle and the Chrome logo badged along a top corner. The hinge that attaches it to the rest of the chassis is a gloss black. When pressed, it audibly pops in and out of place. It’s much less than reassuring.

The bottom of the PC is black plastic with the speakers near the front. Speaking of, they’re mostly terrible. The sound comes from the high ranges. There’s a predictable absence of bass, and at loud volumes the sound becomes grating to the ear. Luckily, there’s a perfectly serviceable headphone jack on the right side of the deck. Also on the right hand side is a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a Kensington Lock and the charging port. What’s worth mentioning about the charger is that it has an impressively small power brick. It’s slightly larger than the palm of my hand. On the left-hand side of the deck is a third USB 2.0 port and a few surprises. There is an Ethernet port, a full-size HDMI plug and a VGA port. The SD/MMC reader on front lip rounds out the port selection.

Opening the laptop reveals Acer’s Chromebook’s 11.6-inch, glossy screen. This is the only physical difference between the C7 and the many netbooks of yesteryear. The resolution clocks in at a predictable 1366x768 and a webcam sits exactly where you would expect it to. The screen waxes between decent sharpness and abysmal color reproduction on account of the enormous amount of light bleed on the panel. The 1366x768 resolution across 11.6-inches does manage to bring out a good deal of detail, but often times the images look washed out and devoid of color.

The deck is fitted with a full-size, chiclet-style keyboard. The keys are soft to the touch, a matte and slightly textured finish helps the fingers find their way. The only major differences between this keyboard and the one you are used to is the absence of the Windows key. Here, it is replaced with two keys, a function key and a dedicated search key. We will dig more into their functionality later. The keys feel okay. The travel is rather shallow, and some keys wiggle in their slots, leading to a few more typos than expected. It’s a perfectly serviceable keyboard for day-to-day use, but it is nothing more than that.

The trackpad is very good. Sitting flush in the palm rest, the trackpad is parallel and equal in length to the space bar. It’s plastic rather than glass, but its texture is pleasant and easy to work with. Google’s particular gestures for Chrome OS all work well, which is more than can be said for many Windows laptops. Pointing around the desktop is as easy as it should be. Aside from occasionally desiring the trackpad to be a bit wider, there isn’t anything to complain about.

The internals are solid for the price. A dual-core Intel Celeron clocks in at 1.1GHz, supported by 2GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD. The Celeron hums through Chrome OS, booting in between twenty and twenty-five seconds. The Chromebook gamely chugged through Bastion without complaint or much in the way of heat and noise. In fact, firing up ten different tabs in Chrome didn’t seem to trouble the machine. Only one test perplexed the Chromebook. Loading photos from an SD card was nigh-impossible. The C7 would chug when opening the SD card, and then crash when I would scroll through the gridded list of photos. I repeated this action, with the same crashy results multiple times. Admittedly, the card was loaded to the gills with full-size DSLR shots, but a Windows machine would have taken its time, not made excuses and failed the task.

The 11.6-inch display boasts an acceptable resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels and it's only the shiny reflection that bothers us overall.
The benefit of a rugged screen, which stays in place once positioned shouldn't be taken for granted and the 16:9 ratio works well for docs and the way the Chromebook OS works in wide windows and lists. Movies and web browsing both work well, as long as you aren't expecting Retina display levels of resolution after using a modern iPad 4.
There's a wealth of options and inputs that make the Acer C7 Chromebook a versatile machine. It can be hooked up to a second screen and used as your main PC and is an ideal travel companion for viewing, browsing and editing.
Even the power supply is phone charger sized which makes it easy to slip in your bag. The Intel Celeron processor creates a fast machine that runs the skinny Chromebook OS at speed.
There's a lack of Google apps at present and users of Windows may feel lost at first, but if all you care about is browsing, writing and photos, it's unlikely to bother you unless this really is your main machine.
Because everything is backed up to the cloud, youíll never lose a file - Google Docs works offline too and saves everything online once you're online again.
The 320GB hard drive is a real surprise, but a 32GB solid state drive would have perhaps been enough - combined with the 100GB of cloud storage - to preserve battery life which clocks in at just under four hours.
Not bad but it could have been an hour or two more with careful design. We doubt many people will fill that hard drive, even if stuffed with movies for use on the go.
Versatile, rugged and surprisingly stylish, the Acer C7 Chromebook is an amazing achievement for £199, especially as 100GB of cloud storage costs half the price of this Chromebook via rivals.
It gets the basics right - decent screen, usable keyboard and has all the inputs and outputs you need when on the go. The Chromebook OS is still struggling for apps and, really, that's the only downside to an otherwise polished performer that shows little signs of compromise for the budget price tag.
Acer C7 Chromebook release date: Out now
Acer C7 Chromebook price: £199