Acer made a new chromebook available for pre-order today boasting exceptional battery life and an extended feature set relative to its older chromebooks.
The new Chromebook 14 uses a 14-inch IPS display. Some models will use a 1080p panel, while less expensive models rely on a more common display with a resolution of 1366x768.
Acer says this system is the first to possess several features. According to Acer, it is the first chromebook with 14 hours of battery life (unfortunately, we don't have one of these systems on hand at the moment to test this claim). Acer also says that this is the first Acer chromebook to feature a 14-inch display, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and the first to have an all-aluminum chassis.
For internal processing power the chromebook uses either an unspecified Intel Celeron quad-core processor or a dual-core Intel Celeron N3060. The N3060 is a Braswell-M SoC using the updated 14 nm Airmont core architecture and it is clocked at 1.6 GHz with a burst frequency of 2.48 GHz.
The iGPU inside of the SoC contains 12 EUs clocked at 320 MHz with a burst frequency of 600 MHz. Although the Intel HD Graphics 400 is relatively weak compared to third-party graphics processors from AMD or Nvidia, it shouldn't have an issue running games on your web browser or handling video processing.
The initial model available for pre-order contains a 1080p display and the N3060 SoC, as well as 4GB of LPDDR3 and 32GB of internal storage. For Wi-Fi connectivity, it has a dual-band 802.11ac NIC that can operate at either 2.4 or 5 GHz. It retailers for $299.99. Other models will be released throughout April.
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