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Acer's $199 system certainly wins on price, but it looks and feels extremely cheap. It offers a fast processor along with Ethernet and VGA connectivity, but at the expense of a glossy screen, poor keyboard layout and lackluster battery life. Did we mention the sea of cheap plastics?

Chrome OS is still a bit of a tough sell, but the C7 and the ARM Chromebook are both cheap enough to finally make it palatable. Neither is an especially high-quality laptop, but at these price points they're a significant step up from the tiny, cheap netbooks.

The Acer C7 Chromebook (C710-2847) isn't the slickest laptop out there, but it runs Chrome OS, has a roomy hard drive and a full selection of ports, and sells for a song. We'll overlook a lot for its $200 price tag.

At $199, the Acer C7 is an attractive proposition for anyone looking for a supercheap portable laptop, but the Chrome OS and short battery life mean you'll have to accept a lot of compromises.

If you only want to browse the web with your notebook, and that’s it, this machine will serve you well.

It might well be a budget purchase, but the screen has a poor viewing angle, battery life isn't great and the keyboard is hit and miss for typing - all of key importance to a device such as this, and all short of the acceptable threshold in each case.

Versatile, rugged and surprisingly stylish, the Acer C7 Chromebook is an amazing achievement for £199, especially as 100GB of cloud storage costs half the price of this Chromebook via rivals.

If you’re particularly precious about the number of keys you have under your fingertips, the size of your hard drive or the brightness of your screen - but aren’t concerned with what your laptop looks like - then by all means, check out Acer’s take on the Chromebook.

Ultimately, we're left unmoved by the Acer C7 Chromebook. It's weird; compare it to the only slightly older Samsung Series 3 Chromebook and it looks on paper like it's better in almost every way. Put them side by side, though, and we'd pick up the Samsung every time.

At $199, Acer and Google's newest Chromebook is practically an impulse buy—if not a must-buy—for anyone considering a 7-inch tablet but hoping to do productivity work instead of mere content consumption on the Web.