Acer C720 vs Samsung Chromebook 2 vs Toshiba Chromebook 2 : Fight!

Godmachine

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So if you are going for a Chromebook there are a dizzying amount of options without question. There is the Acer C720 which is the performance king in the i3 configuration. There is the Samsung ChromeBook 2 ( yea inventive like the Toshiba :p ) and there is the Acer Tegra Kepler edition Chromebook. I tried all three.

Most of my friends have Chromebooks and have loved them for quite sometime now. The Acer C720 really drove in the wedge that has made the Chromebook a really viable option for many day to day usage tasks. Of course no Chromebook is capable of competing with a mid to high end laptop with a full OS. Its not however attempting to compete with those markets so its not really fair to even compare them anyway.

Anyway I borrow three of my friends Chromebooks as they were going out of town and without a reliable internet connection they didn't have much use of their Chromebooks. Chrome really relies on a constant connection as its always passing information back and forth between you and Google. It does feature offline viewing for docs and other programs but for the most part its aimed solely at 24/7 online functionality.

So my week with the Acer C720 was amazing. What a punch that little guy packs. Its only a 1.4Ghz processor but its a Haswell and very much high quality. It absolutely can handle anything you throw at it (besides gaming of course) and you can spam it with a workload and it handles it without chugging. However this comes at a cost. Even when I turned down the display and sound and disabled extentions it only got about 4 hours and 22 minutes after a full charge. Considering how small and capable it is this is a big let down as even shitty mid to low end laptops can easily hit this figure and are MUCH more capable. The other downside is the god awful display. The Acer C720 might be the worst of all Chromebook displays , its got unforgivably inaccurate color and horrible viewing angles. This is all typical of TN territory but even for a TN panel this was very unacceptable for anything but straight up web page browsing. Watching any media on it was entirely a wash. You would be better off with a decent Android or iPad tablet for that purpose and either would blow away the Acer in the battery department as well.

So despite its amazing performance I can't find myself using it day to day for anything but a few tasks. So I tried the Samsung Chromebook 2 and this time with a semi decent 1080p panel and was very happy with the difference in displays from the Acer. It was truly night and day. But again its a TN panel so its not really great for any media viewing which doesn't help but its a cheap device so I think the increased resolution makes it doable. The performance drop however was absolutely not acceptable. Samsung is using their own processor which is an 8 core CPU with 4 high power cores and 4 low power cores. The performance was sluggish at times with more than 6 chrome tabs open. Also the touchpad is quite sensitive to accidental palm swipes while typing making it a bit of a frustration to really spend time typing something up. I was impressed with the build quality , its pretty solid. The keyboard is good as well but not great. I felt it was a bit too crunched for my big meaty hands but I could acclimate if needed. Overall I think Samsung needs to accept that its processors are just not ready for prime time. I tried the Samsung 12.2 tablet with virtually the same processor and it chugged their too but it also had Samsung's terribly memory hungry OS variation of Android to deal with.

Now I try the Toshiba Chromebook 2 for a week. Wow I mean WOW the display for a $300 low end Chrome OS unit is just amazing. Its a 1080p IPS display , one of the few available on a Chromebook and it SHINES. Everything is such a pleasure to deal with versus even the acceptable Samsung 1080p TN display. The Toshiba is even pretty color accurate which is impressive. Again I did not expect this from a $300 Chromebook. The rest of the unit is impressive as well. The build quality is excellent for a Chromebook and reminds me much of Apple's layout which is a good thing to copy. The key presses feel very good and don't mush into the keyboard. The touchpad is excellent and responsive. However there is a downside and that is the performance isn't near that of the screaming Acer C720. Again though this is a Chromebook so that's forgivable. And the Toshiba has double the RAM so you can open about 15-20 chrome tabs before it begins to chug , a feat even the Acer C720 can't claim to do. Also the battery on the Toshiba Chromebook 2? I managed 8 hours and 2 minutes out of it. Very impressive.

I've seen $800 laptops with far worse displays then this Toshiba's display. Its really well above what you would expect for its usage and price range. Even with the Acer C720's speed I think this is the trump card that makes the Toshiba totally worthwhile over the Acer. Its 2015 and I just can't bring myself to stare at a display that makes me feel like its 2007 all over again. If Acer releases a variation with a 1080p IPS display AND Haswell like performance I'll happily jump ship but until then I think for now the Toshiba Chromebook 2 is my favorite of the 3 I tried.

I bought my Toshiba Chromebook 2 today and If your looking for an all around package and don't mind sacrificing some performance then its probably near the top of the pile for Chomebooks at the moment.
 
My C720 has always had really good battery life. In the 8 hour range. But yeah, the screen sucks. It's good for a laptop to just leave in the living room or take into the bathroom instead of my MBPr, and cheap enough to not care too much about its failings (screen).
 
My C720 has always had really good battery life. In the 8 hour range. But yeah, the screen sucks. It's good for a laptop to just leave in the living room or take into the bathroom instead of my MBPr, and cheap enough to not care too much about its failings (screen).

If I used the one I borrowed very casually I would get that I bet but with normal and heavy usage the battery was pretty unacceptable. They must find a middle ground between the lower battery life with heavy usage and the speed benefits of Haswell.

Did you have a C720 i3 or one of the other ones? There are several models.
 
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