Acer Debuts $199 Chromebook One Week Before Black Friday

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By Pete Pachal2013-11-15 13:23:29 UTC

Thinking about snagging a cheap laptop this Black Friday? With one week to go before the year's most insane shopping day, Acer is launching a Chromebook that takes the price of owning a Google Chrome-powered computer to $199.99.

The Acer C270 Chromebook is almost exactly like the previous model the company unveiled in October, which costs $249.99. The new, cheaper model still packs an Intel Celeron processor for 8.5 hours of battery life, an 11.6-inch screen with 1,366 x 768 resolution and 16GB of storage. The only difference is the $199.99 version has 2GB of RAM instead of 4GB.

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Like other Chromebooks, Acer's makes up for its barely there storage space with bonus Google Drive storage in the cloud: 100GB for two years. There's no optical drive, of course, but you get an SD card slot on the right side, and the laptop has both a USB 2.0 port and a high-speed USB 3.0 port. You can also connect it up to an external monitor via the HDMI jack.

Acer's low-cost Chromebook comes just a few weeks after HP debuted a strong competitor in the HP Chromebook 11. Samsung and Google itself offer Chromebooks as well.

All Chromebooks are based on Google's Chrome OS, which is almost entirely based around Google services web apps run through the Chrome browser. Google markets them to individuals looking for a simple computing experience based on web connectivity and organizations like schools whose needs to run specific apps are relatively light.

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Image: Acer

Topics: Acer, black friday, chromebook, Gadgets, Tech