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Okay, so I was looking for a cheap laptop that has good battery life in which I could run Linux. So, I was eyeing on this one. But when I compared the price of this to the other countries, then I was freaked out. The Chromebook costs $199 in the USA which is about Rs. 12,500. With custom duties it should be abou Rs. 15000 which is a good price. But why the hell are they selling it for Rs. 8000 more above that? They do the shipping in bulk so shipping costs are almost equal to nil. Even Moto G which costs $199 in the USA, costs Rs. 14000 in India, so why can't acer manage the same? Why not? This thing could have had been a lot better priced but only if these companies cared about customers rather than just making profit. They just sell them for cheap in USA to expand their market and then come here in India to basically make it cost more. Just for comparison this same thing costs $199 in USA and it costs $380 in India, almost the double. Seriously, not worth that price. Price this at 15k - 16k then I will buy it. Any more than that, no! The product is not bad, but this could have had been priced better, hence a 3 from my side, just for the power consumption and battery backup. It is not Flipkart's fault in any way. It is Acer who is overpricing stuff, so blame Acer not Flipkart. Flipkart is and will remain the best online retailer in India and they are way better than the second best in that regard.
First and foremost this is not direct replacement of your regular PC. You cannot run traditional Windows/Linux application in it. It runs Google created ChromeOS, which means its just a browser. Yes browser, Thats it! Which also means, whatever you can do in your current Chrome browser it can do that, plus some more. Please read chromebook features on google site before bashing that its not actual PC. Now to the actual laptop: Its very, very, very lightweight. Battery life is awesome. In single charge I can use it 6-7 hours (+ I kept it suspended for almost a day). As usual chrome starts in seconds. If you don't powerdown and just suspend (like me) then resume it almost instantaneous. Screen quality is not that good. I have Sony Vaio SR as well and when I compare the display of that 3 year old laptop with this laptop then chromebook stills looks poor quality. But that is not problem for me. Keyboard is good. Initially I had problem with trackpad because surface was bit dry/rough but now it became smooth. It respond to two-three finger gesture very nicely. It also has stereo speakers and sound quality is good. There are two USB ports and one on the left is USB3. The data tansfer from USB3 harddrive to internal SSD was superfast. But since internal HDD (16GB) is small you can't really carry collection of videos/songs into it. Overall I am very happy with this laptop.
First up - it is a bit unfair to not only the buyer but also to Google/Acer to market this as a "laptop". It is not a laptop - it was never meant to be. This device is meant for those who spend most of the time working on the Internet and can use Google Docs as a tool rather than traditional Office suites. First the good stuff - 1. It is super light-weight 2. It boots up very quickly thanks to its SSD Hard Drive 3. Google gives you 100GB of Cloud storage 4. The keyboard is very responsive 5. Since the entire OS is the browser itself and you pretty much exist on the cloud for your computing needs - the chances of malware, viruses etc. are minimal 6. It is silent - it does not get hot - probably consumers minimum power - which means it is a fairly energy efficient too. 7. The best part - the battery - it goes on and on with a single charge. Now for the cons - 1. You need to be perpetually connected to the Internet. This is easier in the developed countries where a Wireless Hotspot is always round the corner. Here you will need your wi-fi dongle or create your hotspot through your cell phone in most cases. Actually, that is all I can think of. The Chromebook is a great device for those on the move and like their tablet. It is definitely a more productive device than a Tablet. A tab is pretty much just for entertainment. This easily trumps that as you can do actual quick work on this. This will never be your primary computing device - you will need your regular PC for that. But as a secondary or tertiary device, this is nothing short of brilliant.
What's the point of this.....most of the functions require internet to work. In a country like India....this wont sell. No office word,ppt etc. What's the use of spending so much money for nothing and getting zero uses of this product....
The decision to buy Chromebook was not easy one to make, very few people had even heard of the product let alone owned or used one. So a lot of research was based on internet reviews online and youtube videos. 2 weeks back, after a lot of head scratching, decided to go ahead with Acer C720 Chromebook. Thanks to Flipkart the product was delivered in 2 days and was very well packed. The packing box had a lot of air packets inside to keep the product safe, very impressive. Coming to Acer C720 Chromebook, the product is delightful. Small enough to be a tablet and powerful enough to be a computer. Easy to carry around during travels and does not eat into a lot of space in bag. The first time I switched on the system it updated to the latest Chrome version in around 15 mins, setup was smooth and simple, the system was up and running in no time. After the first time, system boots up in like 6 - 7 secs flat! and once you log in your web pages are ready in 2-3 secs. So from boot up to web browsing in 10 secs, as far as I know, no other laptop can work this fast. Basically this laptop gets your job done (online) very quickly. If your requirement is for fancy configuration and complex software installation, this is not a product for you. But, 90 - 95% of people use their personal laptop to browse internet, read and edit documents, watch movies and listen to songs and this machine is more than capable to do it. Also, the internal memory is pretty less and to come around this problem you can either carry around a mean capacity external Hard drive (USB-3) or insert a 64GB SD card and make sure you store only the really important files. Overall this is a very satisfactory product and I am really glad to make a decision to buy this. Thanks to Google and Acer for releasing a product focused on just the day to day needs.
research. compare. buy.
