The Acer C7 is altogether a more powerful and capable machine than its Samsung rival, but the downside is battery life isn’t stellar. Although there aren’t any USB 3 ports, there are three USB 2 sockets, D-SUB and full-sized HDMI video outputs, a combined headphone/microphone jack, an Ethernet port and an SD card slot. The selection of ports around the edges is also more comprehensive. Where the Samsung spluttered and puffed, this Chromebook played back both BBC iPlayer and YouTube HD content smoothly, and coped well with high bit rate MP4 files played from local storage.Īnother point of difference for the Acer C7 is the presence of a 320GB 5,400rpm hard disk, an unusual inclusion for a Chromebook (the latest Samsung had only a 16GB SSD), giving extra space for a sizeable video, music and photo collection. The improvement in performance is most keenly felt when playing video. It took 20 seconds to boot, and in general the C7 felt nippier in use than the Samsung Chromebook, especially when multiple tabs were open. Where the Samsung has an ARM CPU, the Acer C7 boasts a more powerful dual-core 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847, backed up by 2GB of RAM it delivered a time of 520ms in the SunSpider JavaScript test – faster than the Samsung’s 892ms. Under the hood, however, the two laptops couldn’t be more different. We can see ourselves getting used to the tiny cursor keys in time, although our first few days saw us repeatedly hitting Pg Up and Pg Down, which are located just above the left and right keys. The fact that the dedicated Search button doesn’t replace Caps Lock as it does on the Samsung Chromebook is another bonus. The keys don’t have much travel, but they’re well spaced and we found it easy to get up to a reasonable touch-typing speed.

Typing and mousing is largely comfortable. The Acer is equipped with a similar Scrabble-tile keyboard and a broad, buttonless, multitouch touchpad. When it comes to ergonomics, it’s close once again. These are similar to the Samsung Chromebook’s figures the main difference is the Acer C7 has a glossy finish, lending movie scenes and photos a fraction more saturation and depth. The maximum brightness of 213cd/m2 makes it usable indoors, if not in brighter conditions, and the contrast ratio of 234:1 is acceptable, too.

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