Acer Chromebook R11
Even by Chromebook standards this little laptop is underpowered, but it’s impossible to dislike
The Chromebook R11 is this month’s cheapest laptop – but it doesn’t feel like a budget machine. Even before you open it up, the smart white trim and aluminium lid create an upmarket impression.
The keyboard carries on that sense of quality – it’s better than we’ve seen on laptops at three times the price, with solid, well-spaced keys. The touchpad is nice and large, although the clickable zone along the lower edge feels a bit rattly.
And these aren’t your only input options. The 11.6in, 1,366 x 768 screen is fully touch-enabled – ideal for Google Play apps that were originally designed for Android. Impressively, you can even rotate the screen all the
way round, to turn the Chromebook R11 into a fairly usable tablet. It’s a little chunky, at 20mm thick and weighing 1.29kg, but you can get along with it.
Predictably, this isn’t a superpowered system that will tear through heavy computing tasks. In fact, it’s powered by a lowly dual-core Celeron N3050 processor, supported by 2GB of RAM. This left the R11 in second-fromlast place in the JetStream JavaScript benchmark, and only a whisker from the bottom of the table in the MotionMark web graphics test.
The screen isn’t exceptional either, although at 245cd/m2 it’s perfectly readable. Indeed, as long as the sun’s not shining too harshly, it looks brighter than it really is, thanks to an impressive 1,487:1 contrast ratio that renders solid, inky blacks. Audio is a strong point too: despite the R11’s small frame, there’s enough volume to fill a modestly sized office with music, and while the low end is lacking, the overall tone isn’t too tinny.
Around the edges you’ll find USB 3 and USB 2 ports, as well as an HDMI connector. That’s probably ample for a little portable laptop like this, and there’s also a full-sized SD card reader – a welcome provision that makes us wonder why the larger R13 was limited to microSD only.
Overall, the Chromebook R11 is a well-designed machine, with some quality touches that you wouldn’t expect for the price. Our key concern is that bottom-of-the-class performance: weighty web apps such as Google Sheets are often sluggish even on mid-range Chromebooks, so this isn’t somewhere you want to skimp. For that reason, even though the Chromebook R11 is a lovely thing to hold, we can only recommend it for the most lightweight of roles.