Acer’s latest Chromebook offers 10 hours of battery for $250
The latest Chromebook 11 delivers basic functionality at a low price.
With its Chromebook lineup, Acer has been trying toe the line between speed and affordability. The new Chromebook 11 is a good example of that. The laptop, unveiled today at CES, is a fanless, small-form machine with touch and non-touch screen options and up to 10 hours of battery life.
While Acer didn't release exact specs for the models -- we only know they'll sport the 'latest Intel Celeron processors,' for example -- but did note they'll come with 4GB of memory and either 16GB or 32GB of eMMC storage. The laptops will have a pair of USB 3.1 Type-C and two USB 3.0 ports as well as a MicroSD card reader. Its 11.6-inch IPS 1,366 x 768 pixel display comes in either touch or non-touch variants, though it's unclear how much the difference will affect the price (previous Acer Chromebooks saw a $50 bump for a touchscreen). It will also offer support for the Google Play store and allow access to Android apps.
We do know that those lower-performance options have dropped the Chromebook 11's starting price to $250/£249, which is slightly cheaper than the rugged Chromebook C771 that Acer introduced for students last August. But it does have double the RAM of the most recent Chromebook 15 that the company released in October, making it much more capable of multitasking through Google's Chrome app suite. If you're looking for an affordable solution with a decent battery life, Acer's Chromebook 11 will hit Europe, the Middle East and Africa in March and reach North America in April.
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