Acer C720P: £750 cheaper than the other touchscreen Chromebook

Acer has unveiled the Chromebook C720P, bringing touch to Google-powered laptops at a low-budget price.

The Chromebook C720P will cost £280 inc VAT in the UK and will arrive in March 2014, an Acer spokesperson told PC Pro. That makes it £750 cheaper than the Chromebook Pixel, the only other Chromebook with a touchscreen launched to date.

The 11.6in laptop features an LED touchscreen with backlit display and a screen resolution of 1,366 x 768. By comparison, the Chromebook Pixel offers a 12.9in touchscreen with a 2,560 x 1,700 display and 239ppi – a higher pixel density than the MacBook Pro Retina 13in.

And like its sibling, the Chromebook C720, the new laptop packs in an Intel Haswell processor, the Celeron 2955U, paired with 2GB of RAM. Acer’s promising a speedier, seven-second boot time with a 32GB SSD, which is twice the capacity of the C720’s. But there’s also an hour less quoted battery life at 7.5 hours.

Buyers get 100GB of Google Drive storage free for two years. There’s also 2GB of RAM, HDMI, USB 2 and USB 3 ports, and 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity. The laptop weighs 1.4kg and is 2cm thick.