Do you know someone in your family that uses their computer for Facebook, paying the bills, and email? Then stop their suffering and buy them a Chromebook. Seriously, it’s nothing but a browser that updates itself every six to eight weeks. Which Chromebook should you buy? They start as low as $199 and climb up to as much as $1450. That expensive one, until today, has been the only one with a touchscreen. But now the Acer C720P Touch exists.
What is the C720P Touch? It’s an 11.6 inch Chromebook with a display that pushes 1366 x 768 pixels. Said display, as mentioned earlier, has a touch screen. Under the hood there’s an Intel Celeron 2955U Haswell processor, 2 GB of memory, 32 GB of storage, and a promise of close to 8 hours of battery life.
Should you buy the C720P Touch? I’ve yet to see a reason why you would want a touch enabled Chrome OS device. Personally, I’d opt for Acer’s $300 C720. Note: There’s a different between the $300 C720 and the $249 C720-2848. The C720 has 4 GB of RAM, whereas the C720-2848 and this new touchscreen C720P have only 2 GB. When you’ve got a million browser tabs open like me, you’ll need as much RAM as you can get.
But should you even buy a Chromebook when you can buy a Nexus 7 for just $229? That’s a question that has a different answer depending on the intended user. As much as I love Android, I’d never in a million years give my mother an Android device, because even I have trouble using Google’s mobile OS sometimes. Chrome OS on the other hand, it’s idiot-proof.
