14 DAY TRIAL // The fact that Acer is struggling to keep up with the competition is a known fact for anybody following the tech industry today. Even so, the company continues to hold one to one ace – Chromebooks.
Despite everything, these machines continue to be selling quite well and Acer is offering the only touchscreen model on the market. Acer was also one of the companies to ever introduce a Chrome OS laptop way back in 2011.
Now it appears the company is gearing up to refresh its lineup of Chrome laptops. Yesterday we talked about the CB5 model, which is apparently going to be the first of its kind to run on the NVIDIA Tegra K1 platform.
A while ago, we also told you a model running on an Intel Core i3 processor was also spotted in a retail location, being made available for pre-order.
This model will be one of the most powerful Chromebooks on the market, but now it appears Acer is looking to introduce another model running on the less impressive Bay Trail platform.
Mobile Geeks stumbled upon one such model in a retail listing in a German shop. The product apparently goes by the name Acer Chromebook 11 or CB3. Strangely enough, it seems to look exactly like the NVIDIA Tegra K1 one.
The new Chromebook will arrive with an 11.6-inch screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. Power is drawn from an Intel Celeron N2830 dual-core Bay Trail processor fitted with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage.
The specification list goes on to include 1 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, HDMI output and a 3220 mAh battery. The price listed in the German shop is €219, which translates into about $311, although we’re very likely to see it sell for a smaller price when it arrives in the US.
Basically, the Acer Chromebook 11 is a cheaper version than the Acer C720 Chromebook that runs on an Intel Celeron 2955U (Haswell) processor.
So you will be faced with a choice here, you’ll either opt for performance and go pick up a Haswell model or concentrate on battery life and decide to go for the Bay Trail version. Either way, we should remind you of the Asus C200 Chromebook, which also runs on the Bay Trail platform.
As Google mentioned at their I/O keynote, Chromebooks are on the rise and such products regularly show up on the Amazon best-selling laptops.
The reason is they are light, cheap and offer decent performance. And soon users will be even capable of running their favorite mobile Android apps, too.