Acer C720 Chromebook review - The Verge

The C720 is strikingly mundane, pedestrian, and downright boring compared to the fun coloring and slick design of the HP Chromebook 11. It’s dark-gray-matte plastic everywhere, save for matte-black plastic on the bottom. It comes in gray, and only gray. The only bit of gloss is found in the bezel surrounding the 11.6-inch display, and sure enough, it’s a fingerprint magnet. But the lid of the C720 doesn’t show any fingerprints, which is in stark contrast to the fingerprint-magnet Chromebook 11. While the HP brings back fond memories of the plastic MacBook, the Acer pretty much looks like any other small laptop. The Chromebook 11 might be the fashionista of this year’s Chromebook lineup, but the C720 is very much the workhorse, and I prefer its utilitarianism.

Aside from being obviously plastic, the build of the C720 is surprisingly solid. Compare it to the lousy build of the C7, and it’s hard to believe the same company actually made both laptops. The hinge is appropriately stiff, the chassis doesn’t have any noticeable flex, and all of the seams are nice and tight. The C720 doesn’t have the CR-48’s matte rubber, but it doesn’t feel offensively cheap either.

It's not pretty, but it's BETTER THAN THE C7

The C720 doesn’t have the HP’s incredibly novel and useful Micro USB charging, but it does have an assortment of traditional laptop ports (HDMI, SD card slot, USB 3.0), all of which are missing from the HP. The 3.5 mm headphone jack is the only problem I have with the C720’s build; it’s stiff and hard to pull your headphones out of it. I was concerned on more than one occasion that I might break the jack on my $200 headphones when I tried to pull them out of the C720.

The Acer doesn’t have the HP’s cool underneath-the-keyboard speakers (audio fires downward out of the bottom), but it still gets sufficiently loud. The sound isn’t great per se — it’s pretty tinny and there’s next to zero bass reproduction — but the speakers do at least handle max volume without distortion. The C720 is a cheap laptop with cheap speakers to match.

Typing on the C720’s chiclet keyboard is, if nothing else, easy enough. The key travel is shallow, the keys are clacky and noisy, there’s no backlighting anywhere, and it will never give my MacBook Air a run for its money, but none of the keys stick and I was able to quickly get up to speed typing on it. It’s not great but it gets the job done, and for a $250 laptop that’s fine.

The trackpad below the keyboard is small, but its smooth finish and responsiveness put it leagues ahead of the sticky and frustrating trackpad on the Chromebook 11. It’s not glass (it’s plastic) and doesn’t feel as luxurious as the Pixel’s or a MacBook’s, but it works and doesn’t get in your way, which could not be said about last year’s C7 or this year’s Chromebook 11.

Trackpads are a seemingly simple thing, but time and again they are a pain point on many laptops, so it’s refreshing to see Acer get this right. Two-finger scrolling and other multi-finger gestures work fine, and I didn’t experience any jumpiness or random cursor movements. It continues to blow my mind that the majority of Windows laptops on the market still can’t master the trackpad, while the lowly C720 gets it mostly right. The only issue I came across was using the two-finger click to perform right-clicks: I had to comically stretch my fingers apart as wide as I could for the C720 to recognize it as a right-click. The C720’s low cost also rears its head in the echoey sound the trackpad makes when you depress it.

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