Reviews
Acer Chromebook 13
How does Acer’s latest Chromebook offering stack up?
Surprise, Surprise
One fun option in the settings is
the ‘Surprise Me’ desktop, which
randomly chooses a new desktop
background every time you open
your computer. There is a decent
set of stock wallpapers as well as
the option to load your ownPreloaded programs
The full suite of Google programs is
preloaded on your menu, so you can
access all aspects of the Play store
and Google Office programs with just
one click. It also offers offline modes
for certain programs as wellGoogle Now cards
The menu on the right brings up a
selection of your Google Now
cards, giving you instant access to
information about sports, traffic,
weather and many more things you
are interested in. It also lists
actions such as screenshotsSaved pages
You don’t have to worry about
losing all your favourite pages when
switching laptops. Logging into your
Google account brings up your
most visited pages list from your
previous laptop, so you don’t have
to go about building them up againT
he main selling points of Chromebooks are
that they’re light, cheap and do the basics
well. In this regard, Acer’s follow up to its
popular C720 Chromebook is fairly successful. At
1.5kg it is marginally on the heavy side for a
Chromebook, but very light compared to most
laptops. Design-wise it isn’t going to win any
awards but it has a simple, clean appeal and it
certainly isn’t something you will be embarrassed
to use in public. However, it does feel a bit cheap
and plasticky and we’d have liked the edges to be
slightly more rounded. Its price is slap bang in themiddle of the Chromebook market at £219. For
that, you get a 2.1Ghz quad-core NVIDIA Tegra K1
processor, 13.3-in 1920 x 1080 HD screen and
100GB of Google Drive storage.
The processor performed all the tasks we set it,
as long as we didn’t try having too many things
going at once. Games played smoothly and looked
great on the sharp screen, although it was lacking
the richness of colour that we’d hoped for. If you
are a gamer we probably wouldn’t recommend
using this model as the processor will struggle to
run high-end games. However, for games such asPortability
At just 1.5kg, you can easily carry the
for... Chromebook around or have it on your lap.Angry Birds, it managed just fine. Video playback
was excellent and, although the screen gets
noticeably darker around the edges as your viewing
angle widens, three people could comfortably
watch a film without much loss of vision.
This model runs the latest version of Chrome
and comes loaded with its familiar suite of Google