During Lockdown and afterwards I spent a lot of time online with Webinars and various Zoom and various other online meetings both work and friend related, far too often people were moaning about the times they could not get into group simply because Windows was spending ages upgrading, other were getting problems with bandwidth for various unconnected reasons. The polite version from many was I am going to get a Chromebook as they do what you want.
Buy Now...
click image to enlargeSo here one of the latest range that may help them and if there are programs and Apps that you cannot do without them Chrome already allows access to the Android store so Apps on your phone now work on recent Chromebooks. Better still Parallels is just launching a program that allows you to run Windows on your Chromebook.
This offering from Acer measures 30.5x205x1.5cm the last figure is the maximum thickness as at the front it is only 1cm thick, it weighs only 1125grams. At 80% screen resolution you get 1920x1080 pixel display. The screen is 29.3x16.5cm which gives the notional diagonal imperial measurement is 13.3inches.
Going around the outside with the connections, the left side has USB ‘C’, USB3 and headphone socket. The front is clear. The right side has volume rocker button, on/off button and USB ‘C’. Both the USB ‘C’ ports can charge the unit via a USB to USB ‘C’ lead, however there is a power brick to USB ‘C’ in the box. The back is clear as the screen goes back to 360 degrees. The base has two landscape silicon feet at the back and two portrait feet at the front, behind the feet are two 2.8x1.5cm grills behind which are the speakers.
It has a 75 key keyboard with the alpha and numeric keys all full size. There is a two centimeter border behind and both sides, at the front there is 8.5cm wrist area the trackpad is 10x6.5cm mounted centrally.
The keyboard is marked with lower case letters but shift key gives you uppercase, there are no function keys nor is there a ‘del’ key but go beyond and use backspace.
The screen has touch abilities which not all Chromebook’s have.
All updates including things like Anti-Virus and done in the background.
It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon SC7180 processor, 4GB memory and 64GB of storage.
So out of the box you have word processing, spreadsheets, Internet browsing and emails either using Chrome and G-Mail or Internet browsing for other email accounts if not linked to G-Mail.
I have downloaded several Apps that I use on my Android phone and while they sometimes look a little different - large landscape screen v small portrait screen – but they all work correctly.
As the screen rotates back on itself it is also a Tablet and the unit automatically opens its onscreen keyboard when required.
This is a nice unit and if my tests with Parallels ability work then being able to use Windows programs mean this could suit a lot on currently unhappy Microsoft Windows users.
At the time of publication the Acer Chromebook Spin CP513 is available from Amazon for £399.99.
!!
