Acer Chromebook R 11....
Abandoning his MacBook, Danny Thorp is confused how something so low-cost can outperform an expensive proprietary toy made for adults.
We take the latest budget Chromebook for a spin with a much-updated Chrome OS and love what we find. Is this your next laptop purchase? We have all the details.
Drawing some influence from Apple’s MacBook Air, the Acer Chromebook R 11 is pleasing to the eyes without overdoing it. You can squeeze a lot of mileage from the Acer and it’s a perfect fit for students and employees whose laptop use doesn’t extend to more than contributing to a collective Google Doc and browsing.
It’s made of a thin, white plastic chassis with a matte finish and a textured white metal panel on top that looks and feels great. That texture extends throughout the entirety of the Chromebook’s exterior, giving it a grippy feeling and overall it feels sturdy.
Under testing with a dozen tabs open, the Acer Chromebook R 11 performed well, albeit with a few minor hiccups. The combination of the quadcore CPU and 4GB of RAM kept things fluid even with a couple of YouTube videos streaming, Google Music running and editing this Google Doc.
The benchmark scores aren’t too shabby: Octane, 8,113; MozillaKraken, 4,789ms; and the outdated Sunspider, 704. Which generally puts the Acer a little ahead of the older Asus Flip C100.
The IPS 1,366x768 display does a sound job. It’s bright, has excellent viewing angles and motion is crisp – although contrast could be better. While the visuals are good, Acer has certainly nailed the audio experience: it’s crisp, clear and can go really loud.
Input on the Acer is mixed. The keyboard is a little soft in its action, but good enough to use. The failing is the touchpad, where the press-to-click feature seem inconsistent and mushy.
Acer claims a 10-hour battery life and in our tests with the brightness level set to 50 per cent we certainly achieved nine hours of general use. The laptop’s battery life is also right up there with the best of them, indeed leaping slightly ahead of much of its Chromebook competition. Add in great performance for most basic tasks, along with a bright screen that works well enough for the occasional video stream, and the R 11 not only feels good in the hands, but feels great to use as well (despite the occasional hiccup).
If you’re in the market for a small Chromebook, it’s hard to argue with Acer’s R11. The price certainly hits a sweet spot, and the laptop is a great machine for getting a bit of work done, kicking back for some tunes, and occasionally breaking it out as a tablet replacement. It may not be quite as stylish as the Asus Chromebook Flip, or as rugged as the Dell Chromebook 11, but it sits firmly in the middle.