 With its factory tuning and data center DNA, an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts. Now I've never reviewed a Chromebook for a couple of reasons. Number one is that no one ever offered me a sample and number two was that I didn't care about them enough to even bother to ask for one. Well Acer managed to address point number one for me by offering to send over their C720P touch screen Chromebook and while I still didn't really care, the spec on this $300 device surprised me. It's got a 1.7GHz dual core Haswell based processor and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. On top of that, I guess I kind of owed them one for being super late on returning some other samples so I was like, sure what the hey, I'll check it out. Now this won't be a review per se since I don't have any other Chromebooks to compare with so it'll be more of a disjointed summary of my thoughts as I fumbled my way through Chrome OS for the first time with some specific comments about this exact model but mostly focused on the general stuff. So first up, the build quality of this unit is better than I expected. It's quite solid but very plasticky and not nearly as sexy and slim as Acer's premium offerings. Booting up is lightning fast, the 16GB of solid state storage takes care of that and the setup process only takes a couple of minutes if you already have a Google account. I'd say it's even faster than Android. It logs you into your junk, imports your profile picture and all that which is great and yes I know Windows has similar functionality if you use SkyDrive and Hotmail, I mean Outlook but who does? So that's great. Speaking of Windows though, some stuff feels a touch borrowed. There's a status tray down here instead of the system tray. There's a handy Chrome Apps launcher in place of the traditional start menu. I wish the launcher could be moved back and forth on the taskbar like it can on Windows but it's stuck in the traditional start menu spot but other than that it's pretty familiar to use. The launcher contains all of your apps but not your extensions, the distinction between which is a little confusing to the user because the list of extensions in the browser contains both and the search within the launcher at the top actually finds everything too but a really cool thing about the search is that it finds stuff that you've installed both apps and extensions and it also finds available stuff and suggests things based on what's available in the store but that you don't have yet. Alright so navigation time. Let's start with the mouse. Double click and drag like tap tap, tap hold drag is not available and the touchpad is generally not super configurable. Some gestures are supported like swiping back and swiping forth in a browser but really not much. I mean that didn't bother me that much but the absence of a hardware right click is a big problem for me. I use it for everything from right click copy, right click paste to correcting spelling errors within emails and a two finger soft touch is just not as fast as being able to use two hands to operate the touchpad at the same time so left hand for tracking, right hand for right and left click and that's pretty ridiculous to me. For the keyboard this arrow key layout is a pet peeve of mine but the keyboard is otherwise actually a very strong point of this notebook. It ain't satisfying to type on and it sounds really thin and kind of crappy but I'm really fast and accurate on it even though I can't quite put my finger on why. I put my finger on it because it's a keyboard. The F keys are gone and that weirded me out a little bit but if they don't have any functionality in Chrome OS beyond being media keys and shortcuts then good riddance to the function modifier I suppose. Immersive mode and overview mode are both quite cool and allow you to basically go full screen or expose style have everything sort of pop up on the screen and allow you to select it something that I ended up using the touch screen for a fair bit and there's a couple other interesting things that are gone so caps lock the scourge of the internet is gone replaced by a dedicated search key but don't worry you can rebind search and not only that but control and alt to other stuff if you want so you can bring back caps lock if it's really important to you and finally there is no delete key but you can use alt back space if you want. I would have personally preferred a hardware delete key instead of power up here and then like a non keyboard based power button but I guess there's always trade-offs and no one's going to be happy with everything. So we'll close the usability with the killer app of this Chromebook the 1366 by 768 touch screen. Yes it's a TN panel so there's nothing really special about it in terms of colors or viewing angles and touch screens with plastic fronts always feel a little bit janky to me but at this price the plastic front is more solid than some of the ones I've felt and it's a miracle that we're getting a touchscreen at all let alone a glass covered one. The main stuff like accuracy is fine and I honestly did find myself using it. I have a touchscreen Windows 8 notebook and I'd say the experience is probably pretty similar. It's not like Android and iOS it's not like you can do everything with the touchscreen but for stuff like you know casually scrolling through a list or you know zooming in and out or selecting which app you want with the multitasking button it offers finer control than touchpad gestures and it's faster than just using the touchpad to point at things so two thumbs up for having that functionality. Two thumbs up. So now let's move into some of the general observations I made about Chrome OS. Minimize, maximize and then dock left and dock right control could be better. You can snap to the sides like in Windows Vista onward but pulling something up to the top doesn't automatically maximize the window and when a window is maximized you have to actually click the little button in the top right corner in order to unmaximize it. You can't just grab it and then drag it around and have it resize itself. The folder structure is simplistic to the point of being absolutely infuriating. The only file storage on the thing is called downloads. I mean seriously I get you want me to use the included hundred gigs of Google Drive storage that I have for two years and get hooked so I can start paying but if unlike iOS I'm gonna actually have storage that's local and you're gonna let me make my own folder structure and stuff within it you might as well at least let me change the name. Not everything is a download. Apps in the store don't filter according to what is compatible so that was a little bit frustrating I mean a great example would be the IE tab app that gives you better compatibility with some websites on Windows so you can have an IE tab within Chrome is only available on Windows where IE is separately installed but it still shows up in the store even when you're searching for it on here. I mean most people will know for that one but this is just a general problem. Speaking of compatibility, playing back video files is pretty hit or miss. Not much can be done to update codec support other than just wait for Google. I mean what you could do I guess if I was gonna give you a solution Google might like is just upload the files to YouTube then watch them on the Chromebook from there but that's not a great solution. Sometimes it's nice to play things locally like if you're on a plane. Multiple instances of the same application pop up in a list down at the bottom when you hover over them just like in Windows 7. I don't think the implementation is that great though for example the integrated video player nests with your file explorer equivalent so that's not that intuitive to me. Google Hangouts on the other hand, this is the best implementation I've seen of Google Hangouts. The conversations spread out from the right across the taskbar and it's like it doesn't feel like it's just bolted to your browser. You don't have to use a third party app. Video calls are super seamless and I love Hangouts on this device. I need an app like that that works exactly this way on Windows. Video calls speaking of Hangouts are also seamless and I guess this is a good time to comment on the video chat experience. I was just randomly listening to some music on the unit getting a feel for it and I was blown away by how loud and clear it gets for what is a very inexpensive notebook then I figured it out. This is a communication device. Acer went balls to the wall on the microphone and speakers because video Hangouts is going to be a huge selling point for a device like this. The webcam is actually decent as well so here's a sample clip of me just sitting in front of it. So my intention is to use this video clip to give you guys some idea of what a voice chat from this Chromebook would look like and sound like. So overall the experience of the Chromebook was surprisingly good. I wasn't expecting it to be this good but it would really take some workflow changes to make a Chromebook seamless for me and the biggest issue would be when I'm without internet and Google knows this. I mean they want you online. In the tutorial the work offline tutorial bit is at the very end and includes the words I gotta kick out of this. For the rare times when you are disconnected from the internet here are some offline ready apps. For the rare times right, okay I guess I never leave the house. The list includes offline Gmail, Google Docs and Calendar as well as some cool third party ones and that's fine but there's plenty of basic stuff that just doesn't work offline. I disconnected temporarily on purpose to diagnose something and the help menu just started behaving strangely like clicking on things just didn't really do anything. It didn't say hey you're offline we can't bring anything up. It just didn't do anything and it took me a while to figure out that I was offline and it's a live document. I mean there's something to be said for live documents that are constantly updated but there's also something to be said for locally stored ones that update periodically because then you can get at them if you're having a problem and you actually need the help. I mean neither solution is perfect. But the biggest challenge for me wasn't what's the experience but rather where does this device fit into my digital life. It's not a replacement for your desktop or your notebook. So what is it? I don't know. Is it a tablet with a low price and a keyboard or is it a netbook with solid battery life, a usable screen size and an OS that doesn't drag it down like a boat anchor. Maybe it's both and as crazy as this might sound while I won't junk my tablet if I'm a very on the move person I would probably go C720P over something like a Microsoft Surface if productivity is a priority for me. They're both kind of immature platforms but at least if I'm going to bet on this one it's only a $300 investment in a device that might not be cutting edge but does what it says it's going to do and in a competent matter and Google has Chrome's ever-growing market share to continue to drive innovation in the Chrome app and extension developer community. Windows RT and Windows 8 Touch. We'll see. I forgot to do an outro. Guys like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment under the video, let us know what you thought about it. I do read the comments at least I do my best to most of the time. If you liked the video and just pressing the like button wasn't enough for you, you can also support us. If you check out the support link you can buy t-shirts and give us a monthly contribution to help us make great videos for you and you can even there's another thing that I completely forget right now that I always mention in the contract. 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