Gadgetory

attention holiday shoppers I'm Scott Stein and this is your in front of me is the Acer c7 and at $1.99 this may be one of the cheapest options you find at a store but before Warren this is not any normal laptop this is a Chromebook in case you're not already familiar it's Google's funny funky side experiment I would call it in the realm of laptop like devices that browse the web but do it through a very focused channel it really isn't a full-fledged device like a laptop although it can do a lot of things that it can like email web documents even offline document editing built into a device that again looks a lot like a netbook that's because it pretty much is except with a different operating system inside now what you get here is a 320 gigabyte hard drive which is a lot higher than what you'd find on typical Chromebooks Samsung Chromebooks that were released earlier this year used SSD up to 16 gigabytes so 320 is a lot more storage space but you can't dive into it the way that you can with a normal laptop what are you really storing on it well it'll be more like downloaded movies side loaded movies videos pictures that type of stuff music files and accessing them you can definitely play them and you can play them when it's offline but it's going to feel a little more like a very simple directory of files than anything that feels like a normal windows-based operating system now there are downsides to this device number one the battery life which is maybe as low as two and a half hours and maybe upwards of three depending on how you tweak your settings that's really a lot lower than any tablet that's out there stay tuned for the full battery test that we do at CNET but that's that's a downside that's a big downside especially if you're flying in a plane and you want to be able to use this thing when you're traveling on the other hand having a little thing like this that you can just web browser on and Chrome OS is very good at web browsing and doing anything that you would normally do inside a browser in terms of flash based stuff or any sort of you know detailed online work well that's all doable here and the trackpad works well enough the keyboard works well enough it's not really anything shocking or surprising there's an Intel Celeron processor here two gigs of RAM but again that's relative because the operating system is tuned to me much faster responding and quicker startup than your average laptop and you do have a Ethernet ports here you've got HDMI you've got USB that full component no Bluetooth but you do have Wi-Fi obviously for getting online and you're getting off lines a little bit of a tricky affair you can do offline Google Doc editing and you can use certain apps offline but the Chrome Web Store which runs its apps are really web based apps that don't run exactly the way you'd expect in my experience compared to something you'd find on iOS or Android all told you're kind of getting what you pay for here is a $1.99 device that could be great in a home that just wants to surf the web and doesn't like the idea of a tablet but don't expect anything like a bargain-basement laptop here this is a very different beast with a battery life that bears noting I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the Acer