Acer brings a Chromebook that can reportedly perform to the standards of a premium laptop. The Acer C720 is the latest Chromebook to hit the market and it runs on Haswell. Offering up to 8 hours of battery life, can the C720 really deliver?

The market has seen a surge of Chromebooks for the past few months. HP recently announced their HP Chromebook 11 and now Acer will be entering the same market. Google has inspired a number of budget conscious Chrome OS based laptops. As the names imply, the laptops are also based on Google's Chrome browser.

The Acer C720 features a Celeron 2955U processor plus 16GB SSD. Acer claims that the C720 can machine boot in less than 7 seconds.

Consumers may doubt having Celeron inside Acer's Chromebook. The Celeron name was always associated with Intel's budget products. They usually offered less power appealing to a fewer number of people.

However, Celeron this time is different. The latest Celeron has Haswell capabilities in it. This offers better and longer battery life. The chipset also has enough power inside to run the Chrome OS. The latest Celeron may have its struggles with the OS X or Windows but Chrome OS does not require as much power. It should be enough to get things done.

The Haswell-based Celeron will be sufficient to run the Chromebook.

In fact, the previous round of Chromebook provided 4-5 hours of battery life on the average. Fortunately, for the SSD storage and Haswell chipset, the Acer C720 Chromebook provides more battery life extending up to 8 hours.

The device also includes 46GB of memory. This is twice than what people often get from a Chromebook. Other specs stick to the standard Chromebook package:

  • 11.6-inch display
  • 1366×768 resolution
  • 16GB SSD for storage with optional configurations coming soon
  • 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi with - Acer is reportedly working on a broadband version
  • 2.76 pounds
  • 0.75-inch thin - this is a great leap as Acer's Chromebook is not 30% thinner than comparable products
  • 2 USB ports - one 2.0 and one 3.0
  • SD card reader

For a user looking for a budget-friendly device that can do the job then Acer C720 Chromebook should be a good choice.