Gadgetory

hey I'm Scott Stein and back-to-school time is pretty much upon us and we're entering the holidays and you want to get a bargain and you look in a circular and you see a laptop that's 199 and it sounds tempting what is it well it just might be a Chromebook because Chromebooks running Google's Chrome OS are gaining in number and a lot of people find them pretty useful for pretty bare-bones experience that's web-based and provides a lot of stuff that a laptop might give you in a lower price point question is why aren't these Chromebooks better looking and performing and I'm going to leverage that onto the acer c7 the acer c7 has been around since last year now this Chromebook is 199 or 229 depending on the tiny spec bump you get inside whether you get two gigs of ram a celeron processor and 16 gig SSD or whether you go up to 4 gigs of ram a 229 this model is the 229 now keep in mind that's pretty much exactly the same price as the new Nexus 7 that little 7 inch android tablet that's pretty slick why would you get this versus that well of course this has a keyboard this is a trackpad it runs full web environment style apps so maybe if you want to use Google Docs and not feel like you're being truly hampered this might give a better experience for that but chrome while it's made advances is still not really great for offline it's really meant to be used online and the battery life on this is still not great this is about maybe four hours of battery now a lot of tablets now we're getting 10 11 hours the new macbook air 10 hours 11 hours I mean you should be expecting 10 hours of battery life this doesn't cut it although it does come packed with ports that seem like they've come from another time period you've got USB 2 you've got full Ethernet you've got vga on the side that's because this thing is actually pretty much a netbook this has been an a retrofitted netbook through and through that has been purposed to run chrome OS and I think it's time that we had models and designs that fit chrome OS sort of flagship Nexus style devices and we got the Chromebook pixel but that is 1200 + dollars runs beautifully but is way too expensive and what about the three hundred dollar price area why is it there something like the Nexus 7 for Chromebooks it's not here yet and pretty much on the google play store your options might be the acer c7 at the moment or the samsung chromebook for two hundred fifty dollars they're pretty similarly spect out I might lean towards the samsung one because the battery life might be a tiny bit better and the design feels a little more comfortable because of this trackpad and keyboard and kind of subpar display and speakers you're not going to have a lot of fun using this unless you're just using it to write emails and documents but if you really really want a bare-bones chromebook netbook type experience i'm not going to hold you back go for it just before warned i'm scott's time and that's a look at the acer c7 once again with 16 gig SSD last year we looked at the one with a 320 gig hard drive happy shopping