Wednesday, 30 March 2016

Acer's aluminum Chromebook 14 edges closer to all-day battery life

Acer has revealed its latest Chromebook with a larger 14-inch screen. It brings with it an optional Full HD display, an aluminium chassis and battery life that aims to outrun the competition.

Indeed, the company is claiming industry-leading battery life for its new Chromebook 14, with an apparent longevity of up to 14 hours on the go, although that's assuming you go for the model with a 1366 x 768 resolution screen.

The other option is full HD (1920 x 1080) and unsurprisingly that display saps a little more juice, although you still get an impressive enough 12 hours of battery life here. Whichever resolution you choose, you'll benefit from an IPS screen with wide viewing angles of up to 170 degrees.

Acer's ComfyView is also on board to reduce eye strain with anti-glare and low reflection technology incorporated.

As for the spec, the Chromebook 14 is driven by an Intel Celeron quad-core or dual-core N3060 CPU backed up with either 4GB or 2GB of system RAM. You also get a 720p webcam, and in the connectivity stakes there are twin USB 3.1 ports along with an HDMI port.

Plus on the wireless front, there's Bluetooth 4.2 and dual-band 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi.

Light and lovely

The notebook's construction is entirely aluminium, which makes it look and feel good, and also means it weighs less – this laptop tips the scales at 1.55kg and is 17mm thick.

As well as the choice of either 2GB or 4GB of system memory, the Acer Chromebook 14 will offer options on either 16GB or 32GB of eMMC storage (there's also 100GB of storage on Google Drive thrown in, of course).

Pricing and availability haven't been confirmed for the UK yet, but we do know that the laptop will launch in Europe next month starting at €249 (around £195, or $280). It's available to pre-order now in the US, where it will launch in April.

Acer will certainly be hoping that the larger screen and aluminium chassis will help make this an attractive and tempting device, and it won't hurt that competition in the Chromebook arena has diminished slightly with the confirmation of Toshiba's exit from consumer laptops.