with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an
amazing choice for gamers and performance
enthusiasts now I've never reviewed a Chromebook for a couple of reasons
number one is that no one ever offered me a sample and number two was that I
didn't care about them enough to even bother to ask for one well Acer managed
to address Point number one for me by offering to send over their P 720p
touchscreen Chromebook and while I still didn't really care the spec on this $300
device surprised me it's got a 1.7 GHz dual core haswell-based processor and 4
gigs of DDR3 RAM on top of that I guess
I kind of owed them one for being super late on returning some other samples so
I was like sure what the hey I'll check it out now this won't be a review per se
since I don't have any other Chromebooks to compare with so it'll be more of a
disjointed of my thoughts as I fumbled my way through Chrome OS for the first
time with some specific comments about this exact model but mostly focus on the
general stuff so first up the build quality of this unit is better than I
expected it's quite solid but very plasticky and not nearly as sexy and
slim as Acer's premium offerings booting up is lightning fast the 16 gigs of
solid state storage takes care of that and the setup process only takes a
couple of minutes if you already have a Google account I'd say it's even faster
than Android it logs you into your junk Imports your profile picture and all
that which is great and yes I know Windows has similar functionality if you
use Sky Drive and Hotmail I mean uh Outlook but who does so that's great
speaking of Windows though some stuff feels a touch borrowed there's a status
tray down here instead of the system tray there's a handy Chrome apps
launcher in place of the traditional start menu um I wish the launch could be
moved back and forth on the taskbar like it can on Windows but it's stuck in the
traditional start menu spot um but other than that it's pretty familiar to use
the launcher contains all of your apps but not your extensions the distinction
between which is a little confusing to the user because the list of extensions
in the browser contains both and the search within the launcher at the top
actually finds everything too but a
really cool thing about the search is that it finds stuff that you've installed both both apps and extensions
and it also finds available stuff and suggests Things based on what's
available in the store but that you don't have yet all right so navigation
time let's start with the mouse double click and drag like tap tap tap hold
drag is not available and the touchpad is generally not super configurable some
gestures are supported like swiping back and swiping forth in a browser but
really not much I mean that didn't bother me that much but the absence of a
hardware rightclick is a big problem for me I use it for everything from uh you
know right click copy rightclick paste to correcting spelling errors within
emails and a two-finger soft touch is
just not as fast as being able to use two hands to operate the touchpad at the
same time so left hand for tracking right hand for right and left click and
that's pretty ridiculous to me for the keyboard This Arrow key layout is a pet
peeve of mine but the keyboard is otherwise actually a very strong point
of this notebook it ain't satisfying to type on and it sounds really thin and
kind of crappy but I'm really fast and
accurate on it even though I can't quite put my finger on why get it put my
finger on it because it's a keyboard I put all my finger anyway I'm sorry uh
anyway the F keys are gone and that weirded me out a little bit but if they
don't have any functionality in chrom OS Beyond being media keys and shortcuts
then good riddance to the function mod modifier I suppose um immersive mode and
overview mode are both quite cool and allow you to basically Go full screen or
um expose style have everything sort of pop up on the screen and allow you to
select it something that I ended up using the touchcreen for a fair bit and
there's a couple other interesting things that are gone so uh caps lock the
scourge of the internet is gone replaced by a dedicated search key but don't
worry you can rebind search and not only that but control and ALT to other stuff
if you want so you can bring back caps lock if it's really important to you and
finally there is no delete key but you
can use alt backspace if you want I would have personally preferred a
hardware delete key instead of power up here um and then like a non-keyboard
based power button but I guess there's always trade-offs and no one's going to be happy with everything so we'll close
the usability with the killer app of this Chromebook the 1366 X 768
touchcreen yes it's a TN panel so
there's nothing really special about it in terms of colors or viewing angles and
touch screens with plastic fronts always feel a little bit janky to me but at
this price the plastic front is more solid than some of the ones I felt and
it's a miracle that we're getting a touchscreen at all let alone a glass
covered one the main stuff like accuracy is fine and I honestly did find myself
using it I have a touchscreen Windows 8 notebook and I'd say the experience is
probably pretty similar unlike Android and iOS it's not like can do everything
with the touchcreen but for stuff like you know um casually scrolling through a
list or you know zooming in and out or
selecting which app you want with the multitasking button it offers um finer
control than touchpad gestures and it's faster than just using the touchpad to
point at things so two thumbs up for having that functionality two thumbs up
so now let's move into some of the general observations I made about Chrome
OS minimize maximize and then dock left
and dock right control control could be better you can snap to the sides like in
Windows Vista onward but pulling
something up to the top doesn't automatically maximize the window and
when a window is maximized you have to actually click the little button in the
top right corner in order to un maximize it you can't just grab it and then drag
it around and have it resize itself the folder structure is simplistic to the
point of being absolutely infuriating the only file storage on the thing is
called downloads I mean seriously I get
you want me to use the included 100 gigs of Google drive storage that I have for
2 years and get hooked so I can start paying but if unlike iOS I'm going to
actually have storage that's local and you're going to let me make my own
folder structure and stuff within it you might as well at least let me change the
name not everything is a download um apps in the store don't filter according
to what is compatible so that was a little bit frustrating I mean a great
example would be the IE tab app that
gives you better compatibility with some websites on Windows so you can have an ie tab within Chrome is only available
on Windows where IE is separately installed but it still shows up in the
store even when you're searching for it on here I mean most people will know for
that one but this is just a general problem um speaking of compatibility
playing back video files is pretty hit or miss not much can be done to update
codec support other than just wait for Google I mean what you could do I guess
if I was going to give you a solution Google might like is just upload the files to YouTube then watch them on the
Chromebook from there but that that's not a great solution sometimes it's nice
to play Things locally like if you're on a plane uh multiple instances of the
same application pop up in a list down at the bottom when you hover over them
just like in Windows 7 I don't think the implementation is that great though for
example the integrated video player nests with your file explorer equivalent
so that's not that intuitive to me um Google Hangouts on the other hand this
is the best implementation I've seen of Google Hangouts the conversations uh
spread out from the right across the taskbar and it's like it's all like it
doesn't feel like it's just like bolted to your browser you don't have to use a
third party app video calls are super seamless and uh I love I love Hangouts
on this device I need an app like that work that works exactly this way on
Windows um video calls speaking of Hangouts are also seamless and I guess
this is a good time to comment on the video chat experience I was just
randomly listening to some music on the unit getting getting a feel for it and I
was blown away by how loud and clear it
gets for what is a very inexpensive notebook then I figured it out this is a
communication device Acer went balls to the wall on the microphone and speakers
because video hangouts is going to be a huge selling point for a device like
this uh the webcam is actually decent as well so here's a sample clip of me just
sitting in front of it so my intention is to use this video clip to give you
guys some idea of what a voice chat from this Chromebook would look like and
sound
like so overall the experience of the
Chromebook was surprisingly good I wasn't expecting it to be this good but
it would really take some workflow changes to make a Chromebook seamless
for me and the biggest issue would be when I'm without internet and Google
knows this I mean they want you online in the tutorial the work offline
tutorial bit is at the very end and includes the words got to kick out of
this for the rare times when you are disconnected from the internet here are
some offline ready apps for the rare times right okay I guess I never leave
the house um the list includes offline Gmail Google Docs and calendar as well
as some cool thirdparty ones and that's fine but there's plenty of basic stuff
that just doesn't work offline I disconnected temporarily on purpose to
diagnose something and The Help menu just started behaving strangely like
clicking on things just didn't really do anything it didn't say hey you're
offline we can't bring anything up it just didn't do anything and it took me a while to figure out that I was offline
and it's a live document I mean there's something to be said for live documents
that are constantly updated but there's also something to be said for locally
stored ones that update periodically because then you can get at them if
you're having a problem and you actually need the help I mean neither solution is
perfect but the biggest challenge for me wasn't what's the experience but rather
where does this device fit into my digital life it's not a replacement for
your desktop or your notebook so what is it I don't know like is it a tablet with
a low price and a keyboard or is it a
Netbook with solid battery life a usable screen size and an OS that doesn't drag
it down like a boat anchor maybe it's both and as crazy as this might sound
while I won't junk my tablet if I'm a very on the Move person I would probably
go c720p over something like a Microsoft
Surface if productivity is a priority for me they're both kind of immature
platforms but at least if I'm going to bet on this one it's only a $300
investment in a device that might not be cutting edge but does what it says it's
going to do and in a competent matter and Google has Chrome's ever growing
market share to continue to drive innovation in the Chrome app and extension developer Community Windows RT
and Windows 8 Touch we'll see I forgot to do an outro
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