A $200 laptop? No way!

First, let me ask you this, would you buy any electronic device today that had a 3.5 hour battery? Of course not! Laptops from 10 years ago had better battery life. Not by much, mind you, but it was better.

So why would Acer put such a shoddy battery into their brand new Acer C7 Chromebook?! Smartphones have better battery life than that. It just doesn't make any sense. I mean, the rest of the machine is actually pretty nice. Chrome OS, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive (decent for any current laptop), 3 USB 3.0 ports, HDMI port, VGA port, 2-in-1 card reader, with an HD display and HD webcam. Not a bad deal at all for $199. So why skimp on the battery?

My Cr-48 Chromebook has a 9 hour battery, and all the Chromebooks that have come before have around a 6.5 hour battery. I love my Chromebook, as a secondary laptop. The battery life is fantastic, and I can surf the web, stream video, write blogs, and many other things with it... and that's the beauty of it. I don't have to lug around my 17-inch monster of a laptop if I don't need to. The Chromebook has offline capabilities so you're not totally dead in the water without an internet connection, and the battery gives you plenty of time to do what you need to. But you're shooting yourself in the foot with only 3 and a half hours of usefulness.

It's not often that I dislike a Google product, but this is one of those times. Don't buy the Acer C7 Chromebook. Seriously. I know the $199 price tag is quite tempting, but do yourself a favor... if you really want a Chromebook, shell out an extra $50 and get the Samsung Chromebook. Sure you're losing the 320 GB hard drive, but you're gaining a 16 GB solid state drive, so it will be quieter and lighter.

Look, these things are essentially netbooks. You use them to connect to the web. That's it! Both options give you 100 GB of storage in Google Drive for 2 years, so you'll have plenty of storage that you'll be able to access from any computer. You don't need a giant hard drive in a Chromebook.

But you do need more than a 3.5 hour battery.