Acer C7 Chromebook review: the rebirth of the $199 laptop?

The 11.6-inch display is where I expected to see Acer skimping most, but it's actually totally usable. Its 1366 x 768 resolution is the same as most 13-inch laptops, so it's even a bit sharper since the pixels are more densely packed. As long as you're not staring at the C7 from six inches away, you won't notice any individual pixels or imperfections. The screen's not particularly bright, and the display and black bezel are both ridiculously reflective — it's also glossy, unlike the matte displays I love on most Chromebooks — but it gets the job done. That's more than I expected from a laptop this cheap.

Every 11.6-inch laptop has a small keyboard, and it always takes some getting used to. The C7's is actually quite good once you spend some time with it — its keys are a little small but well-spaced, well-cushioned, and have a nice clacky travel. Instead of shrinking the Shift key to create more space — like most manufacturers do – Acer instead made the arrow keys tiny, and surrounded them with tiny PgUp and Dn keys. They're really hard to use, but I use Shift much more than the arrows, so I approve of the decision. Like all Chromebooks, the C7 has a bunch of handy function keys above the number row: you get playback and brightness controls, but also one-key access to search, back and forward in the browser, and a window switcher. Once you get the hang of using the keyboard, you really don't have to use the mouse except to scroll.

Thank goodness, too, because the C7's trackpad is horrible. It's sticky as you move your finger across it, and the cursor jumps across the screen in response. It's not even reliable as a pointer, since it's always stuttering around. Two-finger scrolling technically works, but just barely: sometimes I'd swipe and the page would advance by about three lines, and other times it would fly down to the very bottom. Pinch-to-zoom is basically a non-starter — it only worked every other time I tried, and even then took a few seconds to respond. Since Samsung's Chromebook trackpads have typically been really solid, I hate to see Acer not put out a better effort.

But here's the thing: performance isn't often the limiting factor with Chrome OS. The milliseconds of difference in loading and rendering times aren't really noticeable, and Chrome OS simply isn't designed for doing anything particularly heavy anyway. The C7 does a great job with even heavy webpages and apps, including the most intense Chrome OS games I could find and all the crazy proof-of-concept Chrome Experiments — but the things you'll use a Chromebook for are likely much more basic. I never had Flash crash, which made me furious at my freeze-prone Macbook Air, and in general the C7 brandishes one of the best and most reliable browsers I've used. But that's true across most Chromebooks, especially since the "Aura" Chrome OS update, and the C7's performance isn't markedly better than the ARM-powered Samsung model.

The slight improvements aren't worth the tradeoffs, either. Samsung's Chromebook runs completely silently, with no fans or noticeable heat; the C7's fan kicks on as soon as you do anything intensive or Flash-based, and spits seriously hot air out the left side of the laptop. Fortunately the machine itself never gets very hot – just make sure you don't have a bare leg near that vent. The C7 is also slow to boot up, taking 24 seconds to get going rather than the sub-10-second boot times of other Chromebooks. That's likely due to the C7's spinning hard drive — Acer picked more storage over faster speeds, and on an always-connected device like this I'd rather have the speed. It resumes from sleep instantly, though, which is far more important.

Battery life is the other, bigger tradeoff. The C7 lasted four hours, 29 minutes on the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of popular websites and images with brightness set to 65 percent — that's a decent score for a laptop in general, but is really weak for a Chromebook. Samsung's ARM-powered Chromebook lasted over seven hours on a charge, as did its six-month-old Intel-powered model. The battery is removable, so you can tote a spare if you're so inclined, but Acer has no excuse for such poor performance on a device that's essentially just a browser.