Executive summary: $199 is a great price. Chrome OS is quite an interesting and enjoyable computing environment which serves a wide range of needs (close to all of my family's computer use for sure). The Acer C7's performance is noticeably better than that of the $249 Samsung ARM Chromebook for certain things, notably 720p video and Flash games. Plus, the Acer can be opened up and upgraded, unlike the Samsung. Along with "cheaper" those are basically the only areas in which the Acer beats the Samsung, but those made my decision for me. The major flaws of the Acer C7 are the tiny hard-to-use cursor keys, and the downright horrible speakers; the major flaws of Chrome OS, for me, are local network file access and limited supported media formats. Those are significant problems, but for $199 they are not showstoppers.
I'm quite fond of my Acer C7 Chromebook. The overwhelming feature is the price. $199!
(Edit June 2013: so where can you get it for $199? Not, it seems, at Amazon. Currently Best Buy and apparently Walmart a selling a $199 Acer C7 with a 16GB SSD instead of a 320GB spinning hard drive. That's the Chromebook I wish I had. As I say below, many users will see more benefits from a small fast silent SSD than from a big slow noisy hard drive.)
Chrome OS offers a zero-maintenance solution to having a second computer around for family members who essentially only need a web browser anyway. I've come to really enjoy using it. I enjoy knowing that I will never need to provide much tech support for it.
A potential buyer of the Acer C7 might also be considering the $249 Samsung ARM Chromebook. I think the Samsung Chromebook is substantially more beautiful, has no fan or spinning hard drive, and has a much better keyboard and speaker. However, it is underpowered. At Best Buy I was able to try them side by side. The Acer was able to handle 720p video from YouTube almost (though not quite) perfectly; on the Samsung dropped frames were much more noticeable. I also tried a Flash game, Bloons Tower Defense 5, which I've noticed is surprisingly stressful for my older laptops. It runs fine on the Acer C7, but is very choppy on the Samsung. Finally, it is easy (if potentially warranty-breaking) to expand the RAM on the Acer C7 up to 16GB (!), and even to replace the silly hard drive with an SSD. The Samsung ARM Chromebook is essentially impossible to upgrade. That, for me, was the clincher.
The Acer C7, though not actually ugly, is not a particularly pretty machine. The plastic around the display has a particularly cheap look-and-feel. The hinge at least feels strong. The display itself is reasonably nice, with a decent viewing angle. It's glossy.
I do not like the keyboard. I think overall it's not a great keyboard (especially compared to the Samsung ARM Chromebook which has a lovely pleasant-to-use keyboard). The really awful thing is the cursor keys, which are startlingly small and also scrunched up with the page up and down keys. It is really, really unpleasant to use the cursor keys on this keyboard. There are other oddities, if not real problems. The Enter key is oddly shaped for no apparent reason other than gratuitous ugliness. The keyboard has a Caps Lock key (usually replaced by Search on Chrome OS keyboards), and also a Fn key, the only purpose of which is to have a Wifi-Disable keypress Fn-F11 (did anyone really need that?) and to send function keys over Chrome Remote Desktop (I suppose someone might need that---but I regret having a whole key for it in prime territory). This keyboard puts the Chrome OS Search key down with the Control and Alt keys, which is unusual in Chrome OS devices, but it does work to my benefit as it sends Command to Macs over Chrome Remote Desktop. In case it helps anyone, right-Control also sends Command.
I like the Chrome OS keys for back, forward, refresh, full screen, and next window.
The touchpad is quite a bit more resistant to clicking than I would like. I use tap-to-click instead, but there's no tap-only variant of click-and-drag. (I want the 3-finger drag from Apple.)
I often use this Chromebook attached to an external display (and keyboard and mouse... think of it as a desktop replacement!). When I first posted this review I mentioned some issues with this configuration. A Chrome OS update in mid-February 2013 fully resolved these issues for me. The OS auto-update feature is delightful, by the way, automatic and non-intrusive.
With an external Mac keyboard, Command sends Control, which is great for someone whose hands are used to Mac key shortcuts.
The absolute worst thing about the Acer C7 is the speakers. They are bad. Really, really, bad. They're quiet and tinny and I can hardly stand to listen to them. I'm no audiophile, either---I think almost anyone who uses this machine will cringe a little bit at the sound quality. Was this really necessary to hit this price point? Be prepared to use headphones or external speakers. (And not Bluetooth external speakers... I'm told they are not supported in Chrome OS at all, and this machine doesn't have Bluetooth anyway.)
The fan is audible. Not awful, but this is no silent machine. I can't really tell which sounds are the fan and which are the spinning hard drive.
The Acer C7 comes with a 320GB hard drive. The question here is... why? As far as I can tell the only filesystem access you get is your Downloads folder. Which the OS is allowed to clear at will to free up space! Chrome OS was designed for minimal local storage, and frankly I don't see how this space will ever be that useful. I suppose there's the "load it up with movies before the car trip" argument. I'll probably even do that myself when I go to visit my family this holiday season. But I'd prefer to have a silent, fast, tiny SSD for normal use, and bring my movies on an external hard drive.
I wish it had USB 3.0. Oh well. (Another point in favor of the Samsung ARM Chromebook, there.)
On to software. You can use the Web. You can get a terminal with Control-Alt-T and use ssh (but no real local shell). Chrome Remote Desktop is entirely usable. Google Cloud Print seems to work fine, for those of us who have an always-on computer around anyway. Offline Gmail and Google Docs are great if you sometimes lack internet access. Flash games work fine. Google Hangouts has a dumb name but is a fantastic videoconferencing product (the camera and microphone are fine).
While I'm on Chrome Remote Desktop: You'll want to right-click the app icon to get it to "open as window", because if it opens as a tab Chrome itself will consume keypresses like control-N and control-W instead of sending them to the remote host.
One thing that is lacking is the ability is access network file storage. We have an always-on computer filled with video and audio and I'd like to be able to access those files conveniently. What I've done that's workable is started an FTP server on that machine. But it's not a great interface, and each file has to be downloaded before playing, rather than being streamed. "Sneakernet" via USB drive works fine too of course. I think there is pay software, like TVersity, that will set up a media server for you with a nice HTTP interface, but I haven't tried it. And I wish this was built in.
Media playing is a mixed bag. This is irritating... why can't every computer just come with a player as nearly universal as VLC? I haven't had trouble with audio; it seems to play my various mp3, m4a, flac, and wav files just fine. Video is trickier. It seems to play mp4 files happily. It will play some avi files, but not others. Wmv files don't work. For the somewhat technically proficient: you can convert to Chromebook-playable MP4 using various products, like Handbrake or VLC, or the command-line tool ffmpeg: "ffmpeg -i file.avi -c copy file.mp4", "ffmpeg -i file.avi -qscale 5 -strict -2 file.mp4", and "ffmpeg -i file.wmv -qscale 2 file.mp4" are three simple sets of options I've found useful. Frankly having to learn about ffmpeg is, again, irritating; this should just work.
You can enter Developer Mode using a particular keystroke during bootup. This gives you a root shell which potentially allows all kinds of fun. It also wipes all storage in your "stateful partition", so don't do this after filling up your silly 320GB hard drive with things you want. The wiping also happens on leaving Developer Mode. Developer Mode also makes Netflix stop working. After playing with this for a bit I decided I didn't really need it. I like that it's there... the principle of the device being unlocked is pleasing to me. But in the end the clean, minimal, just-works built-in Chrome OS is essentially what I want from this machine.
Conclusion: At $500+ Chrome OS is an oddball. At $200 Chrome OS is a remarkable new paradigm in computing. It's pleasant to use, and for $200, the various hardware and software flaws aren't bad enough to give me much pause. In fact, for $200, if you're at all tempted, you might as well buy it and see for yourself. A reason to pause would be to consider the $250 Samsung ARM Chromebook, which has significantly better aesthetics and might be a better choice for some people. For me, the Acer C7's better performance for 720p video and Flash gaming, plus the ability to upgrade memory and hard drive, makes it the winner.
First of all, I didn't purchase this from Amazon, since the only sellers here are selling it at absurd prices, there are plenty of places selling it for the $199 price. Because of the low price, I wasn't sure what I was going to get. I was quite surprised to see that although it is hardly a premium build, it is quite attractive for the price. Basically, this is about a $300 machine (if it ran Windows) being sold for $199.
I am getting about 4 hours of battery life, which is more than I expected. Since unlike the Samsung unit the battery is removable, I am sure that extra batteries and batteries with a longer life will soon be available.
Compared to the Samsung model this unit costs about $50 less. What you give up is (a) battery life (but the Samsung battery is not removable); bluetooth, some weight and size, and you get a 320gb hard drive instead of the Samsung's 16gb ssd. What you gain is a slighty bigger keyboard, a slightly better screen, and the ability to play Netflix (since the Acer uses an Intel processor). Although there isn't too much use for a large drive in ChromeOS, it is a huge benefit if you want to install Ubuntu which is easy to do on the Acer if you want a "real" OS on it along with ChromeOS. You can also easily expand the RAM and swap the hard drive out if you want, although it will void your warranty.
My big worry was that the hard drive would result in slow boot up times, but honestly this thing boots up from off in about 15 seconds and is extremely quick while surfing, so it hasn't been an issue.
What this thing is NOT is a Windows computer that will allow you to download programs like Office or iTunes. I am amazed at the number of people bitching about this when it is so easy to read and find out what ChromeOS is.
What this excels at is web surfing, not having to worry about viruses, and having automatic updates. WHen I use my Windows and Apple systems I seem to spend most of my time updating, worrying about viruses, etc. For the times when you are watching netflix, hulu or amazon video, catching up on emails, surfing, using goole+ hangout for video chats or doing light weight work with Goggle docs this Acer is quick, cheap and maintenance free. What more could you want for this price?
Buy Acer C7 C710-2847 Chromebook 11.6" Intel Dual Core B847 1.1 GHz 2GB DDR3 320GB 5400RPM HDD Wifi HDM Now
I researched the chromebook prior to my purchase and was worried that I had made a 200 dollar mistake. Many blog reviews mentioned the poor design or cheap materials. So I pictured this very ugly and flimsy laptop showing up. I opened the box and was delighted by what I found inside. I thought the Acer Chromebook really looked good. It passed the preverbal test of I would not be ashamed of being seen with the device. To me it seemed too many reviewers had taken the smallest things and made them seem like critical defects. In my opinion from an appearance perspective the Chrome book holds it own in the economy laptop world.
Performance on the Chromebook has been pretty good. The battery life seems low with only 3.5 to 4 hours. I cant stress enough that it is a different world working with a Chromebook. Not a bad world just a different world. I really like the simplicity of the device. I was not a big google product user so that has been the biggest part of the learning curve. After two weeks I have found that I am really learning to let go of a Windows universe. Life after Windows has been refreshing.
I picked the Acer due to the cost and tasks i typically use my iPad for. For example, I wanted to watch Netflix and other video streaming and the other Chromebook with the SSD seems to be unable to do that at this time.
Some reviews have mentioned the fan noise but I have not had any issues with that. It does turn on but it is not a distraction. I think much of the really detailed criticism is more for people who are very refined in what they expect for a laptop. For 200 dollars this is a great machine to surf the net, watch movies, do social media, and do homework on. It has build in virus protection and no other software is needed. The apps/ browser extensions allow for a great deal of variety in how you use the device. Add a ten dollar wireless mouse and this little machine is good for a casual evening of digital consumption or the typical homework assignment.
I would buy it again.
Read Best Reviews of Acer C7 C710-2847 Chromebook 11.6" Intel Dual Core B847 1.1 GHz 2GB DDR3 320GB 5400RPM HDD Wifi HDM Here
First off, I gotta get it out there... I am absolutely IN LOVE with this thing! I have been a Googlephile since joining Gmail in 2005, so obviously this is right up my alley. But you don't have to use all the Google services to appreciate this revolutionary piece of machine.
Anyone thinking about switching to the Chrome OS needs to know what it can and can not do. In a nutshell, if you can do it with a web browser in Windows, you can do it here. There are a few rare exceptions, but those are disappearing. If you are willing to rethink how you do things, I've found that the Chromebook can do about anything you would want to do. I am a heavy computer user, fix PCs for a living, and I have not once had to use my Windows 7 desktop since purchasing this Chromebook on 12/21/2012.
Now you won't be able to use a lot of peripheral devices with it, but most of the standards work. Keyboards, mice and external storage devices will work fine. Things like cameras, phones, etc will not (though they will still work for charging of course). This does not mean you can't accomplish your task though. The Chromebooks still have SD card slots, so for something like a camera, rather than plugging the camera in to dump pictures, you just take the SD card out and plug that in. Same task done, just in a different way. It also will not interface directly with printers, but with Google Cloud Print, that's not a problem, and you'll still be able to print from it just fine.
As far as this particular Chromebook, I don't have much to say or to compare against other models. This review is mostly about the Chrome OS itself, which is certainly the shining feature.
As someone who spends most of his days cleaning up viruses, re-installing software, etc, the Chrome OS is a HUGE breath of fresh air. It simply works exactly how it is supposed to, and it works the same every single time. I haven't had to install a single bit of software or wait for a single update. All the software you need comes from the cloud through the browser, and all the updates are done silently in the background, and at MOST will make your boot up take an extra 30 seconds. I have not once had to restart the Chromebook because of an odd glitch, though that's not to say it's impossible. Just hasn't happened to me at all through a month and half of heavy use. My Windows machine surely would of done it many times in that month and a half.
The other really great thing about living a cloud-based computing life is never worrying about losing your stuff. Services like Google Docs are constantly saving your work in the cloud. I can in theory (and have once just for fun) stop in the middle of working, go sign into my sister's Chromebook and pick right up where I left off. Fantastic. Gone are the days of losing everything you've done simply because your computer died.
The Chrome OS is also GREAT for people who share a computer. All information is kept private between accounts, unlike Windows where some security exists, but most files are still open for everyone by default. Someone could use my Chromebook to look at all sorts of awful things, and I would never know. The guest mode is also great for the security minded. Anyone who's ever owned a laptop knows that people are CONSTANTLY asking "Hey can I use your laptop real quick? I gotta check XYZ". Well in the Chrome OS, they can just use the Guest account so that they will not mess up any of your stuff, and unlike Windows' guest mode, Chrome OS will delete everything the guest downloaded/viewed as soon as they log out. It's a beautiful thing.
I feel like I could keep going on and on about how much I love this thing, but I bet hardly anyone will read it, so I won't bother. So, on to the wrap up... Oh and did I mention, like everyone else has, just how quickly this thing boots?! Less than 20 seconds. Jesus...
The Chrome OS is not for everyone, but actually it pretty much is. And it is constantly getting better and adding even more features. If you're ready to give up all the frustrations you normally have with a computer, and want to spend your computer time actually DOING stuff rather than working to keep the thing running, then get a Chromebook. If you just spent 10 minutes waiting for your computer to boot up because it had 20 updates to install, and it sent you into a fit of rage, get a Chromebook. If you're tired of paying $50 a year for virus protection that slows things way down and ultimately still lets a virus through, get a Chromebook. If you simply want to be cool like me, then get a Chromebook.
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This is a fantastic little unit. Bought this back in November. For 199.00 you can't beat it. It's like an 11" tablet without the touch screen but with a keyboard, which I prefer simply because all the fingerprints on a touchscreen get to be annoying after a while.
I'm surprised at the price gouging. You shouldn't pay more than $199.00 for this little gem. You can also get it NOW for $199.00 from Googles Play store.
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This is a nice looking laptop and I like the design.
