Acer may have some of the most popular low-end Chromebooks around, but the computer maker also offers two of the most powerful Chrome OS laptops in the market.
Acer unveiled Thursday two upgraded models of its C720 Chromebook, which both run on fourth-generation Intel Core i3-40005U Haswell processors that clock in at 1.7GHz and a Solid State Drive of 32GB. Both feature an 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768p screen running on Intel HD Graphics 4400.
The cheaper C720-3404 features a 2GB RAM and priced at $349. For an additional $30, customers can get the higher-end C720-3871, which runs on a 4GB memory. Acer also says that its newest Chromebooks can run on 8.5 hours of battery life, which is ideal for owners who use their Chromebooks throughout the day.
The newest Chromebooks will become available in the United States and Canada sometime in July. Users can also pre-order the $349 model on Amazon.
"As one of the most powerful Chromebooks on the market, the additional performance of Core i3 enables an extremely responsive experience while surfing multiple tabs of web pages," says Navin Shenoy, vice president and general manager of Intel mobile client platforms Group at Acer, in a statement. "Students, families and business users will recognize the difference in how snappy the new Acer C720 is with Intel Core i3."
Chromebooks aren't normally known for their impressive specs, with most models sporting not-so-powerful processors typically used for mobile phones from manufacturers such as Celeron and Exynos under the hood.
Google has released its own Chromebook Pixel, inarguably the most powerful computer running on the sleek and efficient Chrome OS in the market. Pixel is powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 processor with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB to 64GB of SSD. Unfortunately, customers have shied away from the laptop's lofty $1,299 starting price, considering other computers in the same price range have offline features that the web-based applications on Chrome OS cannot match.
However, the introduction of Acer's newest Chromebooks should create new demand for cheap but powerful laptops from users who do most of their computing activities, such as emailing, web surfing and social networking, online.
Furthermore, Google has announced that is bringing more services offline, saying that most of the customer feedback the company has received involved the inability to do anything on the Chromebook without the Internet. Earlier this year, Google announced that Chromebook users now have the ability to watch and edit videos, write their emails and create documents using its suite of Docs, Slides, Sheets and Drawings apps offline.
"The platform has evolved and keeps improving," says Google vice president of product management for Chromebook Caesar Sengupta. "It is an OS that updates every six weeks. It keeps getting better."
Overall, PC sales have seen a slump thanks to the rising popularity of more portable handheld devices such as smartphones and phablets, but Chromebooks, which have seen a 9.4% growth in market share, enjoy the fastest growth in the market.
Note: This story was updated Aug. 11 to correct the memory to 4 GB in the more expensive C720-3871 model.
