Acer C710-2605 11.6-Inch Chromebook (Iron Gray)

Is this Amazon's hardware equivalent of VAPORWARE? I ordered this probably 6 weeks ago with expedited shipping. Nothing so far. The Square Trade policy arrived promptly and I'm now past the date it can be returned. I have a policy insuring something paid for that is for a product I have never received. I'm patiently waiting, but I wish Amazon wouldn't have represented they had something that they could not deliver! I hope this gets Amazon's attention. I love the Acer products -they are generally excellent values and I love the chromebook. The extra memory and storage drive on this unit are useful to me. What's happening here?

This is to answer the other reviewer who placed a review without owning the product because it hasn't even been released.

Trust me, some users would prefer a hard drive to the cloud, especially if I'm taking pictures out in the middle of nowhere with no internet and want to view my shots. The nature and wildlife shots on the hikes I take are generally without internet available.

The extra 2gb of memory certainly will help when reviewing my 20mb raw shots taken with my full frame Canon DSLR.

The 16gb drive the other reviewer bragged about is half the size of my 32gb flash card for my camera. If my flash card has more the 16gb of data on it, the Samsung 16gb won't even be able to read my card or show my images. If it can't read my flash card using my USB reader then it's usless to me.

Perhaps even a bigger reason for a hard drive is if I want to put Ubuntu on it. You need a hard drive to dual boot or wipe out ChromeOS and put Ubuntu on it.

Buy Acer C710-2605 11.6-Inch Chromebook (Iron Gray) Now

This $300 Chromebook is the same as the $280 Acer C710-2055, but with a 500 GB drive instead of 320 GB. Bear in mind that on a Chromebook, the internal storage is effectively your Downloads folder. I think 320 GB is already too much for a Chromebook, and wish there was an Acer C7 with a fast and silent 16GB SSD instead. If you really need storage get an external drive; it's $80 for a TB these days. That said, if you were going to get the $280 model and really wanted just 180 more GB, $20 is not bad.

But you should strongly consider the $200 version instead. Two-thirds the price, $100 in your pocket, at the cost of 2GB instead of 4GB memory, 320GB instead of 500GB internal storage, and a 4-hour rather than a 6-hour battery. Except for battery-centric users, most people are unlikely to notice the difference. Plus, if you do, you can always upgrade later! One of the best features of the Acer C7 is that memory, hard drive, and even battery are user-upgradeable. (At present, March 2013, Acer C7 users mostly seem to get an after-market longer-life battery from a third-party supplier named CDW.)

I'm a big fan of the $200 Acer C7; see my review here: New Acer C7 C710-2847 Chromebook 11.6" Intel Dual Core B847 1.1 GHz 2GB DDR3 320GB 5400RPM HDD Wifi HDMI USB3.0 VGA Card Reader. Now, at present (March 2013) you can't get it for $200 on Amazon; you can check Newegg instead.

Read Best Reviews of Acer C710-2605 11.6-Inch Chromebook (Iron Gray) Here